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