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List:       kde-devel
Subject:    Re: Dealing with a memory leak
From:       Frederik Schwarzer <schwarzerf () gmail ! com>
Date:       2009-11-19 10:51:23
Message-ID: 200911191151.23452.schwarzerf () gmail ! com
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[Anne Wilson | Thursday 19 November 2009]
> Is there any way at all that I could set an alarm when available swap
>  memory reaches a certain low point?
> 
> I have been having some horrible freezes for the last 2-3 weeks. 
>  Basically the system would suddenly become unresponsive.  A mouse click
>  would take literally two minutes to activate, and it was almost
>  impossible to get keystrokes to be accepted at all.  Whenever I managed
>  to see what was happening in top there was nothing obvious in the
>  applications list, but memory was totally used, including swap, with 0%
>  available.  If I could catch it in time recovery was possible, but if
>  it gets to 0% reboot seems to be the only way out.
> 
> As you know I do a lot of work on userbase, and I often have many tabs
>  open as I refer to other pages.  For quite a while I blamed Firefox for
>  the problems I was having, since if I could get firefox closed and kill
>  nspluginviewer I could always recover.  After a few of these I decided
>  that I just wouldn't use Firefox, and I started working in Konqueror. 
>  To my shock and horror I found that the same thing could happen there. 
>  I'd be fine for quite some time, then suddenly it would freeze and I'd
>  lose my work.  It was obviously worse when I had many tabs open.
> 
> So - I suspect nspluginviewer.  I haven't yet searched for bug reports -
>  I'll do that today - and I need to gather more info before I attempt to
>  file one, but the greatest help, for now, would be some way to warn me
>  when the swap available gets below, say 250KB.  The last bit of swap
>  seems to disappear so quickly that I need to react  immediately to save
>  work.
> 
> Thanks for reading.  I hope what I ask is possible.

No idea how usable this is but for me, the following command line does its 
job. It polls every 5 seconds and shows a notification if the swap goes 
below 512MB.

while true; do if [[ `cat /proc/meminfo|grep "SwapFree"|sed 
s/'[^0123456789]//g'` -lt 524288 ]]; then kdialog --passivepopup 'Swap 
depleting' 30; fi; sleep 5s; done

(remove the newlines)

Hope it helps (or rather: hope someone has a less hackish idea :))

Regards
 
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