I don't know if this goes here (and it is probably opera's fault anyway), but I wonder if anyone can give me some insight into what is going on in this situation (or maybe do some tests themselves).

The machine is running along happily with about 500 MB of free RAM and no swap use. In opera, I have the kde dialog toolkit selected. If I try to save a page (talking about a simple 50 KB page with no graphics) using "File / Save As...", the machine completely locks up for thirty seconds before the dialog box appears. At this point, I now have 1500 MB of free RAM, AND 1000 MB of swap used. Often, there will appear in the lower left listing of the directory, a percentage indicator, as if kde is trying to read thousands of files before displaying them (it's not, the directories contain between twenty and 200 files on an ordinary ext3 filesystem).

A couple of other notes. If I change the configuration settings in opera to use the x11 diaglog toolkit (ugly and with far fewer features), the dialog box appears instantly (and I mean INSTANTLY). With other kde applications (say kwrite), there is a small delay (a second or two) before the dialog box comes up, but no real problems.

Does anyone have any idea what is happening?

Does VLC experience similar issues with it's Qt GUI?

If so, they are probably affected by the same bug - which is the fault of the application (vlc/opera) as they tamper things in such a way that external process launching by Qt is broken.

The KDE file dialog runs a external process as part of opening to carry out certain tasks. It cannot be disabled as far as I am aware.

Have you tried checking with htop or other similar app to see which application is using up all the memory?

which version of Opera?

> Does VLC experience similar issues with it's Qt GUI?

No idea. I haven't used it in years. Got too frustrated with the (at least then) inferior handling of remote media compared to mplayer. The only qt (but non-kde) application I know of (at least off the top of my head) installed on the machine is k3b, which does not exhibit this problem.

> which version of Opera?

Still running 11.11. I have 11.50 queued up to go though, and will have to switch back to the kde dialog toolkit to determine whether the problem still exists in the newest version.

Ok, without testing VLC it isn't possible to confirm the bug. However, it is probable that this is the bug in question.

Unfortunately, I don't know what causes the memory usage issues.