Memory leak - somewhere :)

[Jeetu Golani <j_golani@softhome.net>]

Hello ppl,

I have a Debian 3.0 installation on my P4 2.2 512MB with 256MB Swap system. I 
use KDE 3.1.

For sometime, I've been feeling that there's a memory leak in one of the apps 
because after quite a few days of use KDE becomes slow. Apps I typically use 
are KMail,Konqueror,KMerlin,Konsole,K3B.

I've noticed that memory seems to be consumed at an alarmingly huge rate. 
Sometimes about 300MB+ gets used up overnight inspite of no additional 
programs being run. For e.g. if with a clean boot into KDE I have 300MB of 
free Physical memory left (as displayed by free) and the whole swap free then 
the next morning I may see just 5MB of Physical memory free and the Swap used 
to a degree.

I thought it could be KDE or artsd or some such component/app and I kept 
rebooting my system with one less program running each time i.e. i'd turn on 
KDE and not switch on KMail and see how it performs and next time wouldn't 
switch on KMail and K3b,etc.....did this till i basically had a bare KDE 
session running but the memory usage issue continued.

I therefore thought it may be X and I just put a # in the 
default-display-manager file in /etc/X11, therefore since there's no default 
manager I just get a message stating that at bootup and X doesn't come up.

If I do a free in succession with just this much I notice that my memory is 
going down at a rate of 8KB each successive reduction.....this is most of the 
time...although sometimes reductions can be of different sizes.

I can't make much of it.....is this normal?? doesn't look like it 
should.....since I'm basically not turning on any programs...therefore 
something seems to be up.......any help on either clarifying my understanding 
on the above or tracing the rogue program would be appreciated....has neone 
else noticed something similar.

Thanks
Bye