memory leak in KDE3.1?

[robelanator]

After doing the hard drive install from the Knoppix CD I upgraded to KDE 3.1 and was pleasantly surprised to see a nice increase in speed and decrease in memory usage...HOWEVER... after running for a couple days my free physical memory drops from around 300MB to about 5MB even with no programs open!

If I go to the "KDE Info Center" program and look at the memory usage breakdown I see that it's storing a huge amount of old application data for some reason. Restarting the X server doesn't seem to help but restarting the computer, of course, does.

There's no program using all that memory when I CTRL-ALT-ESC in KDE or list processes or in the shell.

A couple questions, then, if I may:

1) Any idea on how to track down what's causing the memory leakage?

2) How can I flush the cache manually?

Thanks in advance,
Will

[Loper]

<snip> Any idea on how to track down what's causing the memory leakage? </snip>

This is what I found with Google:

http://developer.kde.org/documentation/other/memoryleaks.html

[robelanator]

I figured out why my RAM would fill up so quickly. It's not a memory leak, but a "disk caching" feature of Linux in general. A good explaination is here:

http://www.houseoffusion.com/cf_lists/cache/14/0/166.htm