knotify4, I love thee not!!

[pwabrahams]

My Natty system has been slowing to a crawl. When I looked at System Monitor, I found that knotify4 was consuming an astounding 2.5GB of memory. I didn't invite that memory hog in; it arrived unbidden. I temporarily solved the problem by ending the process, but that's hardly a good solution.

How can I prevent knotify4 from gobbling up my memory?

[Snowhog]

Re: knotify4, I love thee not!!

Well, here on my 11.0464-bit, knotify4 is behaving itself.

 PID USER   PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM  TIME+ COMMAND      
 1630 paul   20  0 682m 27m 18m R  2 0.7  0:51.06 knotify4

[claydoh]

Re: knotify4, I love thee not!!

iirc, knotify4 issues stem from something else that causes it to run on and on. makes it hard to track down.
googling on it shows it is a wide ranging issue

I have had this problem myself, but I do not know what caused it, or what fixed it for that matter. Probably my guess is upgrading to 4.7, but I really don't know. I am already running 11.10 everywhere i used to get the problem ...

Though on an Arch wiki there is something to try
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php..._uses_CPU_time
phonon-backend-vlc is the package to try

[pwabrahams]

vlc versus gstreamer?

Because the problem is intermittent and occurs only very occasionally, there's no good way to know if a particular remedy is effective except to wait a long time.

I've changed the phonon backend to VLC, but I don't know the pros and cons of VLC versus Gstreamer. Is it a theological question like Buddhism versus Islam? Or Kubuntu versus OpenSuSE?

By the way, the manifestation of the problem in my system is not CPU usage; it's memory usage.

[claydoh]

Re: knotify4, I love thee not!!

yes. knotify will suck all the ram, not cpu

as to clv vs gstreamer, no there isn't any theoligical/political/sociological/logical difference iirc.
Amarok folks recommend the vlc backend
http://amarok.kde.org/wiki/Download:Kubuntu
And Kubuntu's own apachelogger says this:
http://apachelog.wordpress.com/2011/...-legacy-media/
As in audio cd support for amarok using it

[sumski]

Re: knotify4, I love thee not!!

Try to disable notification helper service and see if that helps.

[MoonRise]

Re: knotify4, I love thee not!!

Would 17MB be considered too much? That is what knotify4 is @ for me most of the time. I noticed Snowhog's mem usage seems rather small if I'm reading that correctly.

[Snowhog]

Re: knotify4, I love thee not!!

Yes, you are (reading it correctly). Here is what it shows as of one minute ago:

 PID USER   PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM  TIME+ COMMAND      
 1620 paul   20  0 682m 26m 18m S  2 0.7  0:11.41 knotify4

[MoonRise]

Re: knotify4, I love thee not!!

Noticed yours was % so I calculated the % for my usage. At about the same as yours so I guess that is normal.

[ankspo71]

Re: knotify4, I love thee not!!

Hi,
The solution in my case was to disable system audio notifications. After doing that, I haven't had any more problems with knotify4 using up resources (in my case it was high CPU%). I believe it can help with high memory usage too. You will be loosing system sounds by doing this though.

Go to System Settings > Application and System Notifications > Manage Notifications > Player Settings > then change the option to no audio output.

Alternately, as another poster suggested, you might be able to switch to VLC as a phonon backend, or use VLC as an external player for audio notifications. I haven't tried experimenting with that yet.