kded4 using 14GB of RAM

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1

I’ve recently updated a system to Opensuse 13.1 x86_64.
I’ve noticed hard disk working too much. A free reports almost all ram used and some swap used too.
I watch proccess memory use with top

Tasks: 303 total,   1 running, 301 sleeping,   0 stopped,   1 zombie
%Cpu(s):  7.9 us,  4.2 sy,  0.0 ni, 87.1 id,  0.7 wa,  0.1 hi,  0.1 si,  0.0 st
KiB Mem:  11807996 total, 11660152 used,   147844 free,     4840 buffers
KiB Swap: 67100604 total,  4652208 used, 62448396 free,   428440 cached

  PID USER      PR  NI    VIRT    RES    SHR S  %CPU  %MEM     TIME+ COMMAND                                          
 6762 root      20   0 13.933g 8.931g   3928 S 0.331 79.31   4:35.26 kded4                                            
29563 fperal    20   0 1604760 423732   8096 S 0.331 3.589  10:12.96 firefox                                          
 9122 root      20   0 1494064 243920  29268 S 11.60 2.066  18:22.15 firefox                                          
 1990 mysql     20   0 1549992 165940   3664 S 0.000 1.405  17:15.83 mysqld

So kded is eating almost all memory.
why?

2

It’s actually using 9GB. However you should look at .xsession-errors in your home directory as well as /var/log/Xorg.0.log as to what might be causing the problem.

Does the behaviour also happen if you create a new user account and login with that?

3

A bug in some module?

Is this reproduceable?
Then try to disable them one by one in “Configure Desktop”->“Startup and Shutdown”->“Service Management” to see which one causes it.
You should probably file a bug report at http://bugs.kde.org then.

Might be caused by PulseAudio or powerdevil I’d guess, so try disabling “KMixD” and “Powermanagement” first.

4

PS, might be this:
https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=271934
So probably related to the powermanagement.

Unfortunately the patch proposed there hasn’t made it into KDE yet.
You might want to try to update to 4.14 though, the last comment in the bug report states that it got better there…
Although if you installed all updates you should already have the latest kdebase4-workspace.

5

Something caught my eye - in your top listing, kded4 is owned by root.

On my system 13.1/KDE 4.14.0, kded4 is owned by myusername and is using 0%cpu and 138K of memory (16GB total)

If of any use, here is a snapshot of my top:

Tasks: 242 total,   1 running, 241 sleeping,   0 stopped,   0 zombie
%Cpu(s):  3.6 us,  1.1 sy,  0.0 ni, 95.0 id,  0.3 wa,  0.0 hi,  0.0 si,  0.0 st
KiB Mem:  15944380 total,  8149648 used,  7794732 free,   362392 buffers
KiB Swap:     8188 total,        0 used,     8188 free,  4832576 cached

  PID USER      PR  NI    VIRT    RES    SHR S  %CPU  %MEM     TIME+ COMMAND                                                       
 3574 carl      20   0 1324820 276180  40756 S 8.947 1.732 159:50.68 plugin-containe                                               
 3087 carl      20   0 2923140 951812  81708 S 7.622 5.970 254:16.53 firefox                                                       
15322 carl      20   0  531920  57260  33456 S 1.326 0.359  11:27.88 krdc                                                          
 2402 carl      20   0 3589448 250688  62564 S 0.663 1.572  23:02.55 plasma-desktop                                                
19163 carl      20   0   23560   1776   1176 R 0.663 0.011   0:00.57 top                                                           
 1845 root      20   0  641696 344160 285000 S 0.331 2.159  83:17.28 Xorg                                                          
 2395 carl      20   0 3048948 133792  81664 S 0.331 0.839  40:33.42 kwin                                                          
16515 root      20   0       0      0      0 S 0.331 0.000   0:01.65 kworker/0:6                                                   
19136 carl      20   0  623048  33360  21008 S 0.331 0.209   0:01.05 konsole                                                       
    1 root      20   0   48364   4288   2196 S 0.000 0.027   0:04.79 systemd                                                       
    2 root      20   0       0      0      0 S 0.000 0.000   0:00.03 kthreadd

I can’t offer any suggestions, but bet Wolfi can …

6

Oh, right. I missed that.
And Firefox runs as root (and as user) as well.

kded4 should run as the logged in user normally.

I can’t offer any suggestions, but bet Wolfi can …

Well, kill it?
Especially if you are not logged in as root, or are you?
You shouldn’t be.