RE: Severe periodical hang up on KDE 2.2
Jarno Elonen <elonen@iki.fi> wrote:
>
>
> 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?
Along with the possiblility of "bad" video drivers, you might also want
to consider a "hardware" problem. I recently experienced similar
behaviour when I put KDE on a bare-bones DEC Alpha machine with 64 Megs
of memory. (This is equivalent to 16 or 32 Megs in a i386 machine.) In
my case, it appeared that the system was doing a LOT of disk-swapping to
the swap file, but I never could see the swap partition being accessed.
Someone mentioned that it might be due to some excessive memory page
swapping. The symptoms disappeared when I upgraded the memory to 256
Megs.
In your case, 128 Megs of memory should be sufficient (I have a i386
machine here running KDE with that amount), BUT if something is wrong
with your current memory stick and the machine is NOT "seeing" all 128
Megs, then you could be pushing it a bit. One thing I noticed on my DEC
Alpha, is that GNOME would run OK, but KDE wouldn't. This lead me to
initially believe it was a KDE software problem, but it wasn't! The
"problem" was that KDE required more memory to work than GNOME. You
might try firing up GNOME (if you have it installed) and see if it
happens there. This might help you narrow down the "problem" a bit.
Cheers,
-Don Spoon-
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