SUMMARY By opening a very large file (say 1Gb or more) with Kate, either by mistake or on purpose, it can hang the whole system forcing the user to reboot or reset. STEPS TO REPRODUCE 1. Download a large file. I downloaded this and forgot to mark as executable, opened it with Kate by double click https://benchmark.unigine.com/superposition (1.5Gb .run file) 2. Click on the right hand side of the Kate window (text preview pane) or wait a few seconds 3. Apparently, all available ram is filled and the system hangs completely (I have 8Gb of system ram + swap and it hangs pretty much immediately especially if I click on the preview pane) EXPECTED RESULT Either a warning that I'm opening a file too large, or at the very least the program not filling up the entire system ram to the point of hanging the whole system. SOFTWARE/OS VERSIONS Linux/KDE Plasma: Manjaro KDE Plasma Version: 5.16.5 KDE Frameworks Version: 5.62.0 Qt Version: 5.13.1
I can confirm that kate does take up a significant amount of RAM to load large files. I opened a 4.4GB movie and while it loaded for me, it did end up in kate using 14,273MB of RAM. I'm lucky to have enough RAM to cater for that. However maybe a size check on files and a warning if they're over x MB so the user can chose to continue knowing it could take a while.
*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 411493 ***