Heya,
This has been bugging me for a very long time, but I keep forgeting to bring it up.
My home machine (a stock RH 8.0 box, 2.4.20-18 kernel) is normally switched off at the end of the day, and then turned on again in the morning. However, when I leave it on overnight this is what happens:
I leave the machine in the desktop, with no programs running (everything is closed). GKrellm tells me that most of my mem is free, and I can confirm this when I do top.
However, when I wake up and want to do something, the mem is running EXTREMELY low, and the machine is slow as hell. I investigated a little, and found that the kdeinit processes have chowed HUGE amounts of memory, even though they are idle. Basically the kdeinit-kicker, kdeinit-desktop, and so on consume all the available memory, and nothing short of reboot fixes this.
Why is this happening? How do I stop it? Please don't tell me to switch to a WM instead of KDE, that's not the point, I want to know why do these processes consume so much memory when left alone?
Cheers!