I've only seen this a few times and I don't have specifics yet, but I was just wondering if anyone else has seen this. My system occasionally starts swapping. Before halting, I have been able to see that the culprit is KNotify, which is using over a gig of ram, and keeps asking for more. Normally, it uses very little. Has anyone else seen this behavior before? I searched for a related entry and only found a reference to KNotify crashing. In my case, it's not crashing (yet). If I kill it, the memory is recovered, and the system relaunches it with no problem. Any ideas?

Can you see whether this starts happening when a notification starts playing a sound, or something of the sort?

I usually don't notice it until the memory meter is pegged and it starts swapping, but I have noticed that a short time before it happens, it doesn't play a sound that it should (such as emptying the trash, etc.). It may also be related to the unplugging of a USB camera/mic combination. Often when I unplug that thing, the volume will mute, but I can just unmute it.

Just to narrow down the issue, which Phonon backend are you using? You can see that in System Settings -> Multimedia.

I'm using gstreamer. I have vlc as an option as well. Should I switch them?

Try switching to VLC, then logging out and back in.

Will do it. Thanks. As this is an intermittent problem and there is no consistent recipe for reproduction, I have no way of verifying that it worked other than waiting to see if it happens again. However, I know a few activities that seemed to create a tendency toward this problem, so I will try to "perturb" the system Thanks!