What is knotify4 and why is it eating my memory?

adversity

I know this is something associated with KDE, I'm really more curious as to why it's eating up so much RAM? It seems like a memory leak as it happens over time after the system has been up for awhile. Can't quite pin down what causes it. I've seen it take up all available memory and cause the swap to balloon to 1+GB.

http://img689.imageshack.us/img689/3388/knotify4rape.png

franzf · Advocate Joined: 29 Mar 2005 Posts: 4565

I sometimes see this, too - but only, when I do a kde-update and only for active kde-sessions. Logging out, loggin in and all is fine again!
I don't know what causes this behaviour, but I never get it just by using kde.
So: Did you do a kde-update? Do you get this high memory-consumption every time you use kde? If yes. would a fresh ~/.kde4 eliminate your problem?

deStilaDo · n00b Joined: 26 Jan 2006 Posts: 20

It seems the memory leak is in the xine sound backend [1]. Setup another sound backend should solve the memory problem, you can vlc, gstreamer, mplayer, etc., instead of xine.
[1] http://paul-pach.blogspot.com.br/2008/03/finding-bloat-in-kde4.html

dmpogo · Advocate Joined: 02 Sep 2004 Posts: 3269 Location: Canada

i92guboj · Posted: Mon Apr 09, 2012 6:33 am Post subject:

knotify is part of the kde4 notification system, which you can visually identify as the little icon in your system tray from which the notification popups and the progress bars (when copying, moving files, etc) slip up. So, you should be vigilant if this happens after some intensive display of popups or the like, of if you have a lot of hidden notifications that you didn't read sitting in there.

In any case, this is indicative of a problem somewhere in the knotify code, and you should look in the kde bug tracker yourself (bugs.kde.org).

https://bugs.kde.org/buglist.cgi?quicksearch=knotify

If you can't find anything that matches your case in there, please, report it so the bug can get fixed. In the while, you might want to take a look in the system-settings center of kde. There's a dialog somewhere to configure which services get started when kde starts, maybe there's a way to disable knotify until it gets fixed, I don't really know.