Severe periodical hang up on KDE 2.2

[Jarno Elonen <elonen@iki.fi>]

Hi,

My system with KDE 2.2 on Debian unstable is demonstrating some quite 
irritating behaviour:

It works very well except that periodically, about after two hours of use or 
so, it suddenly starts crunching the disk as if swapping heavily.

In about a minute or two every UI process is suffocated and for example the 
KDE clock, mouse pointer, text mode console and SSH daemon (even on nice 
level -19!) stop responding completely.

This goes on about 5-10 minutes after which everything either comes back to 
normal or (sometimes) a few processes (like desktop, konqueror or kwin) have 
died of insufficient memory. I guess kernel runs out of swap space and then 
gives up.

TOP doesn't show any process hogging memory once the hard disk starts to 
roll. Possibly a kernel incompatibility with some part of KDE?


Any ideas on how to start debugging this?


Some version info:

 + Celeron 300 Mhz
 + 128 MB of memory
 + Linux 2.4.13 i686
 + KDE 2.2
   + libqt2 2.3.1-17
   + libqt2-mt 2.3.1-17 (no -gl)
 + XFree86 4.1.0.1
   + Diamon viper 550 (TNT 1 variant)
   + NVidia-GLX 1.0.1512-2
   + NVidia-kernel 2.4.13_1.0.1541-3_i386

- Jarno