Kubuntu 11.10 gradually uses a lot of RAM and Swap

[rms]

This is kind of crazy! I'm only using Firefox and Konsole.
Could Firefox be that much of a problem?

Firefox is not so much a problem as Flash player plugin. Watch videos on Youtube or some other video site for 1/2 hours and note Firefox's memory usage. That memory is not completely released even if you restart Firefox. Also parallel browsing in several tabs sometimes gives amuzing results. I think you should reboot every day if possible to evade all this.

[utherpendragonfly]

@utherpendragonfly:Changing the swap ratio will only help to reduce the swap usage , it wouldnt have any direct effect on ram usage.
try using a different browser and check if it really is a firefox problem
and i forgot to ask what is the ram status at startup

After startup RAM is around 0.6 Gb.
And I should have realized Flash may be a big part of the problem with Firefox. I was just watching flash video and RAM was up to 1.9 Gb. But after closing Firefox and restarting it was back down to 0.9 Gb.
I've noticed today that RAM goes back down to reasonable level after quitting multiple apps. And no swap usage today. Maybe setting swapiness = 10 helped also?
Anyway; I suppose rebooting every few days is not that big a deal!

[dequire]

You also might want to try Mintube (it's in the repositories). You can watch Youtube to your heart's content w/o using Flash \m/

[utherpendragonfly]

Yes, I have Minitube installed. We use it on a laptop running Xubuntu, too. It's great! But a lot of times I'm looking at an article or review and just click on a link to watch a brief video.
Can't wait till HTML5 is the standard and Flash just goes away.

[SteveRiley]

Can't wait till HTML5 is the standard and Flash just goes away.

In open source land, we are blessed with Okular, a wonderful PDF reader. I dearly wish LightSpark were an equivalently-capable FLV player. I suspect the problem lies more with Adobe intentionally making FLV problematic for third-party viewers...

[lindsay_keir]

I have(?)/had the same problem - memory is NOT being released after a task is closed. Quite evident in System Monitor. For examples: I had 3 entries for the 3 videos I watched last night; 3 java entries for the 3 times I re-started RedCar; etc, etc. Sometimes they pop-ed up with a <i>disk sleep</i>

Anyway, just before re-booting I did the search and found this page, AND a page about installing the <b>kubuntu-low-fat-settings</b> apt-package. Which I did. My System Monitor's task icon was "seized" afterward; but I just re-clicked it from K-menu - <b>and the memory holds have gone away!</b> Without a re-boot.

PS: The only task that behaved normally in the memory area was Firefox.

Anyway maybe it's all just a coincidence and I'll end up going through the "top" and "free m" things - although why I don't know.