[kde-freebsd] KDE4 Slowdowns examined further

[Kris Moore]

I've been doing some more investigation into some reported KDE4 slow 
downs, and am now pretty sure that its all related to the internal 
messaging in KDE, maybe related to how it talks to dbus. Here's what 
I've found so far:

First, one of the major areas where you notice the "slowness" is when 
you click on the start button to launch kickoff, or when you click an 
icon on your folderview on the desktop. It seems like after you click or 
double-click something to launch, it takes anywhere from 1-3 seconds 
before the cursor changes, and the program actually starts launching. If 
you open up a konsole session and run "tail -f .xsession-errors" and 
then try to launch an application this way, you'll see what I mean. It 
takes a few seconds before kdeinit4 gets the notification that we have 
double-clicked to start an application.

At first I thought this was a problem with dbus, but I've done some more 
digging and found that launching the exact same command / app from qdbus 
is instantaneous:

# qdbus org.kde.klauncher /KLauncher org.kde.KLauncher.kdeinit_exec 
"dolphin" "" "" ""

If I run the above command, my bouncy cursor loads within milliseconds 
and dolphin loads immediately, no delay at all. So if my thinking is 
correct here, then somewhere between the time when I click or 
double-click, and a signal is generated, there is a 1-3 second delay 
before the request makes it to dbus, and the action is taken.  This 
applies pretty much universally throughout KDE4 it appears, often 
programs run really fast, but when they start doing external messaging, 
thats were the slowdown occurs.

So the question is, how do we fix it? Where should I be looking 
code-wise to find where all KDE messages pass through? Also, I haven't 
run KDE4 on Linux, is this problem there as well, or just specific to 
FreeBSD?

Should I refer this to some other KDE bug / developer list to help 
examine this bug?





-- 

Kris Moore
PC-BSD Software
http://www.pcbsd.com