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
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?
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.
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.