Hi, i'm using KDE 4.6 over Arch Linux. I don't know if this is the right place for this question, but i couldnt see a problems section. Move it to where it corresponds.

This morning i turned the pc on, booted ok, but freezed withing a few seconds.
Couldnt even do anything with ttys, freezed as well. But at least there i was able to see some messages before a total freeze: Out of memory: kill process.
So i restarted again and quickly opened system monitor: 4700 processes and my 4GB of RAM full after a few seconds. Then the freeze.
I booted in recovery mode, and then i run "/etc/rc.d/kdm start"
This way everything goes normal everytime. Normal boot leads to memory leak situation.

I didnt have much time to look but with top it looked like there was several instances of plasma desktop, every one of them consuming lots of ram.

What can i do?

Remove all plasmoids one by one, and follow where the behaviour gets back to normal (i.e. when it stops leaking). Then report your findings on bugs.kde.org, filed against the plasmoid you have identified as causing the leak.

Thanks.

> 4700 processes

This looks like a fork bomb[1] (probably due to some bug). Did you see which processes were listed?

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Anyway, it would be wise to add this line to /etc/security/limits.conf
@users hard nproc 600

and add yourself to users group if you're not already in.

This will limit the number of processes a member of @users group can start to 600, thus effectively immobilizing all fork bombs (intentional and accidental)


[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fork_Bomb

How do you normally load KDM? inittab method or Daemon method?

Sorry i couldnt answer till now. Thx to everybody for the quick answers.

@Sebas, i renamed .kde4 so it started as default. Same behavior, so i guess it's not related to any plasma i had.

@ivan, i'm going to try limit the number of processes, i'll let you know.

@Hans, I forgot to mention, i'm using systemd as init. kdm is launched in inittab, which is support by systemd.

But strange thing, booting with normal init, i cant even get to the desktop, it takes a while to load modules, and daemons, and finally it doesnt pass alsa.

What also bothers me is that if i start kdm as root in recovery mode, there is no problem, but normal booting leads me to the problem.

If you can determine which processes are causing the Out of Memory issues that would be very helpful. Given some reports from other users, please try running the following as soon as you can after login, prior to the system freezing:

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killall -9 akonadi_control akonadiserver mysqld nepomukserver nepomukservicestub virtuoso-t

bcooksley wrote:If you can determine which processes are causing the Out of Memory issues that would be very helpful. Given some reports from other users, please try running the following as soon as you can after login, prior to the system freezing:

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killall -9 akonadi_control akonadiserver mysqld nepomukserver nepomukservicestub virtuoso-t

I'll try to do a quick capture of the system monitor.

I have akonadi, nepomuk, mysqld disabled by default.
I thought i saw plasma-edsktop consuming 900M, kwin 500M...

Do you have Desktop Effects enabled? That's the next thing I would try to disable:

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kwriteconfig --file kwinrc --group Compositing --key Enabled --type bool false

or if you have time, Shift+Alt+F12.

I'm able to enter running kdm as root once booted in recovery mode, so i disabled desktop effects. Same old.

I added the limit of 600 process in /etc/security/limits.conf to @users, and my user to the group users. Still 9400 tasks in top (just 4 running). I added then root to the group users to try, since it looked it wasnt my_user's processes. 7400 tasks in top (again just 4 running).

I cant be fast enough to see system monitor. top is faster and i could see the big quantities of memory are in VIRT column. I'd have to check it with system monitor, but it looks like it's fulling ram with that memory.

try running htop (if installed) in console mode, Ctrl-Alt-F1
you'll be able to sort on various columns

or run ps with options and pipe into a text file and post it on pastbin
can be run in konsole or in console mode "ps aux > ps-output" with no quotes

google01103 wrote:try running htop (if installed) in console mode, Ctrl-Alt-F1
you'll be able to sort on various columns

or run ps with options and pipe into a text file and post it on pastbin
can be run in konsole or in console mode "ps aux > ps-output" with no quotes

I got it. It was nothing related to kde, as i suspected once init was giving me problems.

I had in modprobe.d a .conf file trying to load a module, already loaded (in rc.local) but with the --ignore-install option, so it tried to load it over and over.

Thx to everyone for the support, and sorry i wasted your time.

BTW, as I'm not able to do manually loading cause systemd, how is the right way to load via modprobe.d? Because i'm using modprobe in rc.local by the time being, but i dont like this solution.

Viper_Scull wrote:I had in modprobe.d a .conf file trying to load a module, already loaded (in rc.local) but with the --ignore-install option, so it tried to load it over and over.

Thx to everyone for the support, and sorry i wasted your time.

BTW, as I'm not able to do manually loading cause systemd, how is the right way to load via modprobe.d? Because i'm using modprobe in rc.local by the time being, but i dont like this solution.

please start a new thread for this as it's a separate topic