Locale issues -- weird KDE lag

[Brian S. Stephan]

Hi. Prodded along by the discussion on UTF-8 elsewhere on this list I 
decided to try changing my locale (in Linux) to something UTF-8 based. 
Upon doing so, I have noticed some strange problems with KDE's behavior.

First let me say that as far as I know, UTF-8 is working correctly. I put:
LANG=en_US.UTF-8
in my /etc/env.d/ directory and updated /etc/profile.env then logged out 
and back in. echo $LANG in bash shows the correct setting, and bash can 
correctly read filenames with accented characters and even Japanese kanji. 
That's not the problem though.

Just about everything KDE-based seems to start slower, even when only 
displaying "standard" English characters.

KSensors is the worst example (when I click the system tray icon to draw my 
sensor panel, it is a white window for about half a second before anything 
useful is drawn), but it's not KDE proper so I'll move on to other 
examples, such as KWrite. When I start KWrite, at first only the window 
title bar and window outline is drawn, with a gray area where the menu and 
toolbars go and the text input area is empty. Then after about half a 
second, everything is finished being drawn as usual. If I open two files 
(first to populate the existing window, second to open a new one) the 
second window is as quick to draw as always, so it's just program init. 
And all this on an Athlon XP 2500+, I'd hate to see the lag on my other, 
slower boxes.

The problem is this doesn't happen when I don't have $LANG set.

Every real KDE app seems to behave this way. The first time Kopete is 
drawn, same deal. Every other time I hide to system tray and restore it, 
it's snappy. I used lsof to see what resources were in use and found that 
every app is loading /usr/lib/locale/locale-archive while when I don't 
have $LANG set only some apps load that. I don't know if this is expected 
or not.

My problem may seem trivial but it's a distraction and a certain 
performance degradation. Please help.

P.S. What is ~/.kde/share/locale/ for? I have it but it is empty.

TIA,
Brian
-- 
      Brian S. Stephan - software engineer, Linux guy
OpenPGP key - http://bssteph.irtonline.org/pgp/bssteph.asc

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