console-kit-daemon - can it be stopped?

I have 60 instances of Console Kit daemon on Ubuntu 9.04 server installation. Is it safe to kill those or stop these processes. They seem to be taking about 20% of RAM each(see on htop).

ConsoleKit manages console logins in graphical mode (i.e. with gdm or equivalent); if your server doesn't have those, you don't need it, but then it won't be started anyway. Also, you may be interested in this question.

But you don't really have 60 instances taking 20% of RAM each. The ConsoleKit daemon is multithreaded, and htop shows a separate line for each thread. It's really one process and there's a single copy of that memory; you can confirm that with ps wwu -C console-kit-daemon.

Additionally, the memory usage shown by htop includes code memory, some of which is likely to be shared with other processes using the same dynamic libraries.

On a debian based headless server the way to remove and stop console kit that I found is this

apt-get remove dbus-x11 consolekit

apt-get autoremove

Tested on debian testing (jessie)

All Ubuntu machines (all versions) I know has those appearing in htop (mine has, servers have) and the number shown is 0,2 which means 0.2% and not 20% (htop reports are already in %). Anyways as Gilles said before they are not effectively running. mysqld do the same thing on mysql servers (not 60 but a lot) each reporting they are eating a good part of RAM (like 20 or 30% each) and that is not possible. You can check the free memory and you'll see they are not using this RAM.