Massive Memory Leaks and Frequent Orphaned Process Spawning

[Prescience500]

I've been using KDE and Linux for many years. I may have had an issue here or there getting hardware figured out at first, but nothing like what I'm experiencing since my fresh install of 15.04.

My computer would get slow and stay slow until reboot. When I looked into it, I found that my RAM was used up and was using lots of swap. Closing applications and killing processes reduced RAM a little and just barely reduced swap. When restarting, the computer was using very little RAM, though. I tried to determine which applications or process might be leaking, but it seems to happen by using just about any application or process (except Steam for some reason). Sometimes, I can't even make it 10 minutes without having to reboot. Other times, it will last a couple of hours.

To compound the memory problems, I noticed that orphaned processes (I think I'm using the term right) are spawning often. The last time I booted, I had 3 orphaned processes of Firefox, and several other orphans of other processes. I can't ever seem to forcebly kill them. I don't know how to patch, program, or script, but I really want to get this working right. Any help or guidance anyone can give me would be greatly appreciated, even if it's only how to give developers useful debugging data for a bug reports.

Thanks.

[ronw]

The last time I booted, I had 3 orphaned processes of Firefox

Consider starting with an empty session, at least for debugging purposes. System Settings > Startup and Shutdown > Desktop Session.

ksysguard or top aren't showing you what's eating your RAM?

I don't use file search, but there are tips here on how to get baloo to finish its initial scan, which seems to sometimes be a problem.

[dtr]

My computer would get slow and stay slow until reboot. When I looked into it, I found that my RAM was used up and was using lots of swap.
Thanks.

Kubuntu default swappiness is 60 (meaning swap is frequently used when RAM is about halfway used). You can decrease it to 10 so that swap isn't used as much. For a better explanation and instructions to change this setting: http://askubuntu.com/questions/10391...ure-swappiness

[Prescience500]

Ronw, I already set it to default to empty session for faster boot/shutdown times. Ksysguard does show what's using RAM to an extent. At first it does pretty well, but when I added up all of the RAM usage from processes, it was often far below the total RAM usage that it reported. I already disabled baloo completely. It never even gets activated.

Dtr, While it won't fix anything, changing the swappiness could be a big help in making things more bearable for longer. Thanks.

I have a tentative theory that my problems are related to interoperating kde4 and kde5 (I know I'm using it wrong, but it's easy to say.) That's why it seems to come from everywhere, but apps like ktp are seem to cause memory to leak more than any other.

[Prescience500]

Now that swap isn't being used, it's a little easier to see where the memory is allocated, though there's still tremendous amounts of supposedly used memory not accounted for. Fortunately, I can now see that when plasmashell segfaults, all of the unaccounted for RAM that was being used up is suddenly freed. It must be plasmashell that is doing the vast majority of leaking. If i'm not mistaken, my research showed that they already have a fix for a plasmashell leak lined up for plasma 5.4. Hopefully they backport it and it fixes my problem, including the segfaults.

Also, I haven't seen any orphans since the swappiness was changed, but it may be too soon to tell. I've no idea why it would make a difference, though.