[vox-tech] KDE? Or something more insidious....?

[Shawn P. Neugebauer]

On Sunday 08 December 2002 02:09 pm, Richard S. Crawford wrote:
[df output snipped]
> Here is the output of "free".  Honestly, I don't know what I should be
> looking for (I know, that's a lot of points off my geek score), but 3036
> under the "free" column looks kinda low to me.
>
>               total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
> Mem:        255104     252068       3036          4        536       9532
> -/+ buffers/cache:     242000      13104
> Swap:       530104     442604      87500

The 3036 isn't necessarily bad, but you're also used up 80% of your
swap space!

> ...and finally, the first few lines produced by "top".  If I'm reading
> this right, gconfd-2 is eating up a lot of processor cycles, even though
> I'm using KDE and not GNOME.  But that's only if I'm reading it right.
>
> 10377 rscrawfo  15   0  473M  81M    16 D     0.9 32.5   1:30 gconfd-2

%CPU is 0.9, %MEM is 32.5.  gconfd-2 has eaten a lot of memory.
Also, the "D" indicates the process is in an uninterruptible sleep--if it's
still that way, the process is stuck.

The slowness you are experiencing is probably due to swapping.
(Are you hearing lots of disk activity when you try to do anything?)

gconfd is a gnome registry-like utility.  So, the question is, why is it
eatting up so much memory, what's it doing, and why does it keep doing
it through repeated logouts, logins, etc.?

I see at least one bug report in the gnome bugzilla regarding a bad
memory leak in gconfd--but it fills /var/log/messages with lots of stuff.
Is there any corroborating evidence in /var/log/messages, or
/var/log/XFree86.0.log? Are you up-to-date with patches from RedHat?  
That would be step one.  Have you installed a non-RedHat gnome?  
If so, you'll want to get it up-to-date.

shawn.