> One way to figure that out is to attach gdb to it while it's running and > then print a backtrace. If you do that several times, you may break in the > code > that's running a lot. But even if that works it is likely still not easy to > figure out what's going on. > > Other ways to get information would be to strace (or ltrace) this daemon to > get > an idea what it's trying to do. But CPU usage by the application itself > cannot be seen this way. > > An easier way to start is to run iotop and check if kded4 is doing any I/O > related to this cpu usage.
Well, thanks for the ideas. As long as it takes at least 55% of the CPU anyway, this is going to be quite cumbersome, and I have some other (productive) tasks to do, so I don't expect to investigate this before Sunday night. R-C