[Digikam-users] Are all these processes left behind digikam's fault or KDE's?

[Jakob Østergaard]

On Tuesday 27 November 2007, Chris G wrote:
...
>     chris     7751     1  0 Nov25 ?        00:00:00 kdeinit
> Running... chris     7754     1  0 Nov25 ?        00:00:00 dcopserver
> --nosid --suicide chris     7756  7751  0 Nov25 ?        00:00:00
> klauncher [kdeinit] chris     7758     1  0 Nov25 ?        00:00:01
> kded
>     chris    16652  7751  0 Nov26 ?        00:00:00 kio_file
> [kdeinit] file chris    16706     1  0 Nov26 ?        00:00:01
> kio_uiserver chris    19220     1  0 Nov26 ?        00:00:00 knotify
> [kdeinit] chris    19223     1  0 Nov26 ?        00:00:02 khelpcenter
> help:/digikam?anchor=resizetool.anchor chris    25536  7751  0 15:16
> ?        00:00:00 kio_help [kdeinit] help chris    25537  7751  0
> 15:16 ?        00:00:00 kio_help [kdeinit] help

Just parts of the KDE environment - the things that make the entire 
desktop with all its applications work as a smoothly integrated well 
oiled machine.

You'll find that these parts take up virtually no resources at all; it's 
a few handfulls of megabytes, probably most of which is demand paged 
from disk anyway - compared to any modern browser or e-mail reader, the 
overhead of the processes you mention is negligible.

I bet you hadn't noticed them if you hadn't run ps  :)

> I don't run KDE, I run fvwm as my desktop,

KDE is a desktop environment.

fvwm is a window manager.

Those two are very different systems. A window manager is part of a 
desktop environment (KDE uses kwin per default - you could change that 
if you wanted to), but it is not a desktop environment (at least not in 
the same sense as KDE - I know that one could always argue that these 
are just different shades of grey).

> should digikam/KDE really 
> leave all this junk behind when I exit?

I bet they are left behind because other KDE apps would need them 
anyway, so it's faster to leave them spawned and idle than to 
exit/start them.

So, despite the fact that it may look wasteful to have a few processes 
sitting idle on your system, it may well be the most efficient thing to 
do.

> Anyway it probably explains 
> why I couldn't get the digikam help, it thinks it's already there.

This sounds unlikely in my ears.

-- 
Best regards,
   Jakob Oestergaard
   [The SysOrb Team]