kded4 eats memory like mad

[Gunter Ohrner]

I upgraded from Karmic to Natty dev a few days ago, and since then I have massive memory consuption problems with KDE 4.6.1.

kded4 growse huge after only a few hours of KDE usage and causes lots of swapping.

My system has 2 GB of physical RAM and 2 GB swap, and yesterday nearly all of the swap and most of the RAM was used, kded4 taking about 1,6 GB all by itself, according to top (which is not *that* precise, I know, but it's an indicator.)

kded's RSS was about 170 MB, so most of its virtual memory must have been paged out - dead, leaked memory? - or not actually been occupied.

Is this a known problem, or is there any way to determine for what reason kded allocates that much memory?

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 11.04
Package: kdelibs-bin 4:4.6.1-0ubuntu3
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 2.6.38-7.39-generic 2.6.38
Uname: Linux 2.6.38-7-generic x86_64
Architecture: amd64
Date: Fri Apr 1 21:51:54 2011
ProcEnviron:
 LANGUAGE=
 LANG=de_DE@euro
 SHELL=/bin/bash
SourcePackage: kde4libs
UpgradeStatus: Upgraded to natty on 2011-03-30 (2 days ago)

[Gunter Ohrner (gohrner)]

  PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
22228 gunter 20 0 1701m 1.1g 7068 S 0 55.2 1:43.88 kded4

[Gunter Ohrner (gohrner)]

KDE Bug #206317 (https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=206317) may or may not describe the same issue...

[Gunter Ohrner (gohrner)]

Unfortunately, this bug has not been fixed by the latest KDE uploads (4.6.2).

I know the virtual memory size is not really significant per se, but look at it in relation to the swap usage... At the time this snapshot was copied from "top", kmail and kopete were the only running "real" KDE applications, in addition to several desktop plasmoids. (Analog clock, xeyes, comic viewer, music title viewer, notes, char selector and calendar.)

KDE 4.4 in Karmic used *much* less memory, it was much less swapping - with such few applications like kmail and kopete it was hardly swapping at all...

Mem: 2047252k total, 1539664k used, 507588k free, 29480k buffers
Swap: 1992024k total, 1382948k used, 609076k free, 769552k cached

  PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
 2675 gunter 20 0 1311m 217m 10m S 0 10.9 1:14.81 kded4
18065 gunter 20 0 861m 112m 32m S 0 5.6 0:35.20 kmail
 3036 gunter 20 0 761m 38m 7480 S 0 1.9 0:02.17 knotify4
 3037 gunter 20 0 1133m 37m 13m S 3 1.9 12:07.61 plasma-desktop
18069 gunter 20 0 322m 29m 6628 S 0 1.5 0:00.66 kio_imap4
 3217 gunter 20 0 720m 24m 13m S 0 1.2 0:27.00 kopete
 3141 gunter 20 0 844m 24m 10m S 0 1.2 0:14.05 krunner

[Gunter Ohrner (gohrner)]

Whoops, sorry, Karmic ran KDE 4.3, so with KDE 4.3 is was much better. I've no experience with KDE 4.4 and later so far.

[scatterzone (cosmicbuff)]

I have the same issue on kubuntu 11.04 beta2 .

Never had this issue in my arch setup in my other partition of the comp. There is incremental buildup of memory usage until the stage where computer hangs.

applications open:
firefox with 5 tabs. no flash or intense java action. 200MB
systemmonitor with ksysguard using 27 MB
kded4 currently at 800MB and climbing
No plasmoid widgets running, no desktop composition, no strigi indexer, usage. (no=disabled)
kde specific apps are not running

kubuntu 11.04 beta2
kde 4.6.2
uname -a: Linux ****-laptop 2.6.38-8-generic #42-Ubuntu SMP i686 athlon i386 GNU/Linux

I ll try with other distros too..

[scatterzone (cosmicbuff)]

yep , It is reproducible , noticed the increasing memory leak to kded4 after every reboot.(With new session on every reboot )

However its not seen on my archlinux setup which is running the same versions as of kubuntu applications , so mostly looks like its ubuntu specific. There are similar reports in linux mint forums .

theres a more detailed report by member alfabravoteam.

[scatterzone (cosmicbuff)]

nope wrong again , eats cpu in arch..

its a kde bug , found few bug reports. Its a little old though , looks like they havent figured it out yet.

serioulsy hampers usage..

[sfc (sfc-0)]

I'm also suffering from this bug since kde 4.6.1... now i tried kde 4.6.3 and found that adding "noapic acpi=off" to grub and the kded4 is calm now.(disable ACPI)
---
1912 sfc 20 0 619m 29m 16m S 0 3.4 0:00.80 kded4
---
Maybe the problem is in PowerDevil?

[Gunter Ohrner (gohrner)]

The memory leak is in the "Power Management" kded4 service. See https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=271934#c15 for the upstream bug report.

[Gunter Ohrner (gohrner)]

Apparently, this bug has been fixed upstream:

https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=271934

Is it possible to integrate the relevant patch or the fixed package into Kubuntu, so KDE powermanagement becomes usable in Kubuntu Oneiric?

[Maxim Levitsky (maximlevitsky)]

At least the patch that upstream said that fixes that issue, went into polkit-qt-1_0.99.0-3ubuntu0.1.

[Harald Sitter (apachelogger)]

Thanks for taking the time to report this bug. 11.04 reached end of life on October 28, 2012.
Please see this document for currently supported Kubuntu releases:
https://wiki.kubuntu.org/Releases

Unfortunately this means that there will be no more bugfixes for 11.04. It is also recommended that you upgrade, if you have not already.

Please feel free to report any other bugs you may find, and thanks for your understanding.