[kde-linux] Renicing KDE service daemons

[Kevin Krammer]

On Thursday 05 February 2009, David Baron wrote:
> Nepomuk has one, akonadi spawns several children for KABC resources, all
> taking memory and CPU whether or not any client is using them. KDE4.2, with
> all its improvements, seems to slow to a crawl. KMail is a big
> victim/offender.

Not sure how KMail is related to the other two since it is not yet using these 
services.

Anyway, the service usually don't do anything on their own, just waiting for 
applications requesting their service.
Depending on the system setup and kernel capabilities they might use some 
timer based file change monitoring, but on most systems they won't.

So most of the time they will be sleeping.

> I want this stuff to run niced. And seems to work on fully named processes
> but not for regular expression names like akonadi.*
>
> How might one set up niceness in KDE's configs themselves?

Since most services are either started through D-Bus activation or through the 
launcher service, their commands are usually specified in some kind of 
description file, e.g. .desktop or .service files.

One could check if it is possible to extend the respective execution command 
with a nice command.

However, since they get active as part of another processes service request, 
renicing them could potentially lead to problems, e.g. an application not 
getting a result because the service does not get run when the application is 
running in parallel with a better priority.

Dispite running two KDE sessions in parallel, I don't see any of those 
services pop up in top other than an occasional 1% CPU of kded or kded4

Would be interesting to know which services take any noticable amount of 
processing power on your system while being idle.

Cheers,
Kevin

-- 
Kevin Krammer, KDE developer, xdg-utils developer
KDE user support, developer mentoring
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 189 bytes
Desc: This is a digitally signed message part.
URL: <http://mail.kde.org/pipermail/kde-linux/attachments/20090209/de8a90d8/attachment.sig>