[ltp] User processes disappearing while idle

[Richard Neill]

On 04/06/11 17:38, Jeffrey L. Taylor wrote:
> OpenSuSE 11.4, KDE, Lenovo T520: while idle, almost all user processes will
> disappear.  Only two daemons (fetchmail and search) and kde4d w/ 2 child
> processes remain.  The screen brightens slightly on tapping a key or wiggling
> the mouse, but is still dark gray.  I can switch to tty1.
>
> Two questions: Any way to prevent it from happening?  Any way to restart the
> desktop environment short of rebooting?
>
> While trying to send this e-mail, the keyboard and mouse clicks stopped
> responding.  The mouse could still move the cursor, but nothing else
> responded, including the 3 finger salute (reboot shortcut).

Is there anything interesting in the logs (syslog, dmesg etc)? What is 
the memory usage like? Could the oomkiller be getting them?
I find it very useful to run a CPU/Memory monitor applet in the taskbar, 
so as to see if the system really is idle. Can you ssh into the machine, 
and still have a working connection as it starts to fail?

Richard