I'm sure there's been a ton of "KDE4 USES TOO MUCH MEMORY" threads in the past. I know I've complained about it before. But I have to say, at least on start up, KDE is now using a respectable amount of memory. Under 400MB on my laptop before my favourite KDE apps start up, and about 1GB after they have all started up (this does not include any web browser. including memory use of firefox or chrome/chromium would be completely unfair and unrealistic). I'm rather happy with the performance, look, and memory use of KDE4 these days.

My main issue right now is that after a day or three, my laptop ends up using so much memory that my swap will end up 1-2GB full, and my laptop has 4GB ram installed. This sort of memory just /should not/ happen with my usage. I would be ok with 2-3GB usage including a browser, in fact that's what it used to be, and what other people report. So I'm looking for other people who have similar issues. I want to try and narrow this problem down, and hopefully get it fixed. I know a recent fix to the intel_gfx driver helped quite a bit, it went from having to reboot every day, to every 2-3 days (and that's after suffering with slowness for a day or so), but its still not good enough.

Some details about my kde setup:

I use Konversation, Kopete, Akregator, Konsole, Kate (I love kate and konsole!), Plasma (obviously, but only with a few widgets loaded, typical task bar stuff, the system monitor group thing, and the pastebin widget), and Kwin with compositing (sometimes, when I start getting slowness, or want to start an OpenGL game or app I tend to turn it off), Kmail1 (Debian still hasn't packaged Kmail2, and last time I tried it, it was somewhat of a mixed bag, took ages to scan my mail, talking a day of 100% cpu use, and it lost all my filters and passwords, it has been a while though, it may have improved, though I have heard memory use of akonadi+kmail2 is worse than kmail1, and that is a deal breaker for me, kmail1 is bad enough, 500MB right after starting? eep). Those are the apps I keep running all the time. I occasionally start up other things as well.

Who would like to help in figuring this out with me?

Interesting. Can you use htop, or System Monitor to determine which applications are using your computers memory?

I've used every tool I could find to measure which applications are responsible, and the memory isn't assigned directly to a process, at least according to htop, and friends. Even the ps_mem.py script I found which is normally much more accurate than htop can't figure out where the memory is going. It is not assigned to a process at all. My best guess is /something/ is doing something funny with gpu resources (since the intel driver uses regular memory for storing its objects). xrestop doesn't show any leaks or major abusers of pixmaps. But memory continues to fill up.

I've talked to the intel_gfx guys about it, and they do try to help, but they don't really know what is going on either, they currently think its my system (ie: kde) causing the excess memory use. As the gpu does list an excess amount of "gem_objects" allocated, and then never used again.

I gather the X server/Intel driver doesn't offer a way to find out which application is causing those allocations? My top suspects here would be KWin and Plasma Desktop.

You can use "kquitapp <app name>" at a Konsole terminal to cause them to close and see what impact that has on your system.

Which version of KDE do you have installed btw?

bcooksley wrote:I gather the X server/Intel driver doesn't offer a way to find out which application is causing those allocations? My top suspects here would be KWin and Plasma Desktop.

You can use "kquitapp <app name>" at a Konsole terminal to cause them to close and see what impact that has on your system.

Which version of KDE do you have installed btw?

There might be a way to tie "bo" allocations to individual applications. I'll have to look at that later.

I have KDE 4.7.4 installed (from debian experimental).

It's probably going to take a few days to get the system into a state where the problem is very obvious.

I had these same sympoms on Kubuntu. Then they went and came back for a short while after that. I seem to remember that is was allways tied to an upgrade of the Xserver. Havent seen it for a while now.

What versions of X11 and the Intel driver are you using?