Today I fired up KMyMoney (4.6.3) after about a month of not using it. I entered a couple of scheduled transactions when prompted to do so, updated security prices, and tried to save the file. The progress bar stopped, my system became unresponsive (the mouse and the keyboard did not respond) and my hard drive madly ground away for several minutes. I couldn't think of anything else to do so I powered down the computer. This totally corrupted my file (not too surprisingly I guess) and left it at 0 size. I had a backintime snapshot, so I was a able to restore. I repeated what I had done previously and had no problem. I don't really know where to look for evidence of what happened. I am running mint 13/kde 4.10.1

From what you are saying, you probably have a hardware problem.
The only times where I've seen Linux halt like that were when I had either a hard drive or a graphic card fail on me.
My recommendation is that you make an offline backup and check your hard drive/s thoroughly

Well, thanks for the advice, I will certainly check my hard disk, but I don't exactly know what you mean by "halt". It seemed like it was acting as if the continuous disk activity was monolopizing the cpu. The mouse would kind of move a bit every now and then after some lag, but not much. I didn't wait too long after I tried the keyboard before deciding to power it down, so I don't know if that might have eventually responded as well.

The behaviour you are describing sounds like heavy swapping, often described as thrashing because it is usually not recoverable from apart from with the power switch. Unfortunately there is not much you can do about this, other than monitor memory usage closely.

The actual memory usage will depend on the applications you are running, the hardware drivers in use (primarily in the case of Nvidia and Ati hardware) and how long you have been running the system.

The only solution I am aware of is to disable swap - but that creates other risks as well, such as sudden loss of data (when the out of memory killer is invoked) or other forms of thrashing (the linux kernel as a rule on my system needs a minimum of 250 - 300mb to use as cache to be happy).

bcooksley wrote:The behaviour you are describing sounds like heavy swapping...

Thanks for the suggestion. This sounds quite plausible. I had a couple login sessions going in the background, firefox w/ multiple tabs, and KMyMoney seems to use quite a bit. I have upgraded my system RAM from 4 to 8 GB.