Memory Leak in X?

[Blitzkraig]

Check out these Tops on my system:
top - 10:14:53 up 2 days, 12:30, 3 users, load average: 1.24, 1.28, 1.46
Tasks: 97 total, 3 running, 94 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie
Cpu(s): 6.2% us, 9.6% sy, 0.4% ni, 83.5% id, 0.1% wa, 0.0% hi, 0.3% si
Mem: 514244k total, 505140k used, 9104k free, 77868k buffers
Swap: 1630556k total, 2652k used, 1627904k free, 185508k cached

PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
7810 root 25 0 61676 41m 4740 R 97.0 8.3 500:13.37 X
14193 brian 15 0 112m 41m 16m S 2.0 8.3 3:19.73 firefox-bin
1 root 16 0 1564 544 472 S 0.0 0.1 0:00.73 init
2 root RT 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 migration/0
3 root 34 19 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.30 ksoftirqd/0
4 root 10 -5 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.25 events/0
5 root 12 -5 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.01 khelper
6 root 14 -5 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 kthread
8 root 20 -5 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 kacpid
77 root 10 -5 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.13 kblockd/0
109 root 16 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.10 pdflush
110 root 15 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.54 pdflush
112 root 18 -5 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 aio/0
111 root 15 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.93 kswapd0
701 root 15 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 kseriod
780 root 15 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.45 kjournald
924 root 13 -4 1564 504 420 S 0.0 0.1 0:00.17 udevd

Now a second top a few days later, the system had only been up a few hours.


top - 20:53:24 up 2:11, 3 users, load average: 2.93, 3.41, 3.32
Tasks: 108 total, 3 running, 105 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie
Cpu(s): 1.6% us, 3.1% sy, 0.0% ni, 0.0% id, 95.3% wa, 0.0% hi, 0.0% si
Mem: 514244k total, 508220k used, 6024k free, 392k buffers
Swap: 2682772k total, 1031952k used, 1650820k free, 19772k cached

PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
4585 brian 15 0 1063m 396m 2428 S 3.1 78.9 30:51.11 kded
111 root 15 0 0 0 0 S 1.6 0.0 0:03.53 kswapd0
1 root 16 0 1564 264 244 S 0.0 0.1 0:00.65 init
2 root RT 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 migration/0
3 root 34 19 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 ksoftirqd/0
4 root 10 -5 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.02 events/0
5 root 11 -5 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.01 khelper
6 root 10 -5 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 kthread
8 root 20 -5 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 kacpid
77 root 10 -5 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.79 kblockd/0
109 root 15 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.02 pdflush
112 root 12 -5 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 aio/0
701 root 15 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 kseriod
777 root 15 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.08 kjournald
921 root 12 -4 1564 180 180 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.13 udevd
1317 root 15 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 khubd
1699 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 scsi_eh_0

This kind of thing happens ALL the time with Mandriva. After a few days I have to kill X and start it again. Why is X and Kded (kde desktop I assume since that is what I use) eating up soo much resources? Off of a fresh start of X they use hardly anything. I have not had this happen in Redhat 9, FC4, Slackware 10.1, or anything else I've used recently.

This is a fresh install, no updates of any sort downloaded. The only software I've added was firefox and the Nvidia drivers.
My PC Specs:
P4 2.4, 512mb of pc3200, 80gb HD
Its not a beast, but should be enough to handle linux.
Any idea on what it could be? Is there anything else I could post that could be useful?

[bigtomrodney]

Is it actually slowing down or just growing in resources? Unix systems handle memory differently to Windows, so applications cache information and libraries over time. This incereases performance. A well tuned box running well will have 90% of its memory used and 10% free.

[Blitzkraig]

It actually slows down. So much that the mouse pointer will "skip" accross the screen. It has taken hours to run some farily simple scripts in this state. For example, on a previous install I downloaded apache. I ran the ./configure, make, make install scripts and it literally took hours to complile everything. I rebooted, ran those commands again and it only took a few minutes.
Everytime I see slowdowns like this, I run top. Everytime it is X and kded that are hogging the cpu and memory. Once the memory is taken up it seems to spill over to swap.
EDIT: All of these problems seem to go away when I kill X, memory gets released and the system runs normally