The memory usage keeps growing

[letrec]

Hi,

I've got a fresh 11.10 installation and observing abnormal memory usage by xorg and other X-related programs. My current top output looks like this:

Tasks: 132 total, 1 running, 131 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie
Cpu(s): 2.5%us, 1.2%sy, 0.0%ni, 95.9%id, 0.5%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.0%si, 0.0%st
Mem: 2056376k total, 1957764k used, 98612k free, 33740k buffers
Swap: 1998844k total, 13856k used, 1984988k free, 373436k cached

PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND 20 0 637m 26m 16m S 3 1.3 7:49.01 knotify4
20 0 828m 83m 33m S 3 4.2 2:16.94 plasma-desktop
20 0 25144 2056 1096 S 1 0.1 1:29.66 dbus-daemon
20 0 333m 41m 19m S 1 2.1 5:59.33 plugin-containe
20 0 1604m 457m 18m S 1 22.8 5:31.42 Xorg
20 0 1189m 638m 33m S 1 31.8 16:37.31 firefox
20 0 162m 4632 3768 S 0 0.2 0:20.31 NetworkManager
20 0 625m 49m 31m S 0 2.5 1:37.47 kwin
20 0 9380 1124 688 S 0 0.1 0:27.50 ksysguardd
20 0 418m 28m 19m S 0 1.4 0:06.12 konsole

I'm not sure it's OK for knotify4 to allocate 828m of virtual memory and xorgs's memory constantly grows and at some point the system gets barely usable and I need to restart it.

[dibl]

Re: The memory usage keeps growing

That is ugly.

Try shutting down firefox. Or maybe even reboot and then don't start anything except a konsole window. After letting it idle for 5 minutes, take a look at top. Here's what mine looks like in that situation:

Tasks: 159 total,  1 running, 158 sleeping,  0 stopped,  0 zombie
Cpu(s): 3.3%us, 0.7%sy, 0.0%ni, 96.0%id, 0.0%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.0%si, 0.0%st
Mem:  1021780k total,  945288k used,  76492k free,  22860k buffers
Swap: 1046524k total,   6852k used, 1039672k free,  328580k cached

 PID USER   PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM  TIME+ COMMAND            
 1147 root   20  0 178m 31m 11m S 3.3 3.2  0:03.38 Xorg             
 1761 don    20  0 625m 26m 16m S 1.7 2.6  0:04.61 knotify4           
 2142 don    20  0 351m 26m 18m S 1.0 2.7  0:01.50 konsole            
 1810 don    20  0 206m 17m 14m S 0.3 1.8  0:00.10 akonadi_agent_l        
 2198 don    20  0 21460 1416 1012 R 0.3 0.1  0:00.55 top              
  1 root   20  0 24184 2172 1248 S 0.0 0.2  0:01.37 init             
  2 root   20  0   0  0  0 S 0.0 0.0  0:00.00 kthreadd           
  3 root   20  0   0  0  0 S 0.0 0.0  0:00.04 ksoftirqd/0          
  5 root   20  0   0  0  0 S 0.0 0.0  0:00.46 kworker/u:0

I'm suspicious that the problem might be firefox, not Kubuntu. If it behaves as long as you don't run firefox, and then the memory leakage begins when you start firefox, you'll have your culprit. (I'm a chromium-browser user .....).

[letrec]

Re: The memory usage keeps growing

If it's the case (Firefox is to blame) I'd expect the memory usage to go down after I close Firefox, but it's not happening. So I suspect xorg is leaking.
After just using Firefox and Apper it's looking like:

1220m 659m 18m R 24 32.8 22:52.87 firefox
2847m 505m 23m S 2 25.2 8:02.76 Xorg
636m 20m 13m S 2 1.0 8:41.69 knotify4

It doesn't look quite right for xorg to use 2847m.
I can't recall anything like that while using 11.04.

[Teunis]

Re: The memory usage keeps growing

The memory use of Firefox is easy to follow, just type:

about:memory

into the address bar and hit return.

My system gobbles memory when Energy Management is enabled.
So I make do without it.

[letrec]

Re: The memory usage keeps growing

By Energy Management you mean the KDE one?
How to disable it?

[Teunis]

Re: The memory usage keeps growing

Open K-menu/ System/ System Settings and go to Startup and Shutdown.
Select Service Manager and find Power management in the lower half, remove the tick mark.

Or type Power in the search box in the right-hand top of System Settings.

Sorry for the wrong translation (Energy Management) in my original post.

On my system this stops an uncontrolled growth of kded4.

[dibl]

Re: The memory usage keeps growing

Open K-menu/ System/ System Settings and go to Startup and Shutdown.
Select Service Manager and find Power management in the lower half, remove the tick mark.

Or type Power in the search box in the right-hand top of System Settings.

Sorry for the wrong translation (Energy Management) in my original post.

On my system this stops an uncontrolled growth of kded4.

Interesting. On Debian (sid) I don't see this issue, with KDE 4.6.5 -- I leave that Power Management service running for days. I'll play with my Kubuntu 11.10 VM and see if it happens there.

[dibl]

Re: The memory usage keeps growing

I ran Kubuntu 11.10 overnight, with chromium-browser and top running. It is a VM with 1GB of memory and 1GB of swap. At first I thought I was seeing the problem, as the chromium-browser process started creeping up and it got to 8% of memory in the first hour. But when I checked it this morning the browser process was only at 7.5%, and nothing else was using excessive memory, and the system was very responsive. So I can't reproduce it.

[Teunis]

Re: The memory usage keeps growing

The memory leak in kded4 has an error number assigned and people are working on it.
http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=271934
It's probably related to certain hardware but I've had issues with it since at least KDE4.6/ March this year.

[letrec]

Re: The memory usage keeps growing

Disabling Power Management fixes the issue.
Thanks a lot!