My desktop PC is also used as a NIS/NFS server for a small workgroup. It runs for months without reboot.
Recently I observed that when I log into a desktop session the computer becomes less responsive for several minutes. A polkitd
process in a D
state generates a lot of disk I/O activity. Its VmSize is over 600MB and its VmRSS is over 400MB.
The machine is still on OpenSUSE 11.3 with polkit 0.96. I plan to upgrade in the summer.
There are several reports of memory leaks in polkitd that were fixed in 0.98 (freedesktop.org, opensuse.org). While upgrading will probably solve the problem it would take about a day and I am looking for a quick fix.
There is no polkitd script in /etc/init.d and the parent for the polkitd process is init
itself.
PID PPID USER CMD
....
22362 1 root /usr/lib/polkit-1/polkitd
Question: How do I restart polkitd without rebooting the system? Can I do it from within a desktop session or should I log off the desktop session and log on to the text console?