Locale issues -- weird KDE lag

[Brian S. Stephan]

On Thursday 07 October 2004 17:49, James Richard Tyrer wrote:
> Brian S. Stephan wrote:
> > 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.
>
> It is possible that something is timing out looking for some LC_*
> setting.
>
> Do you have: LC_ALL set?  And do you have any of the other: LC_* set?
>
>  env | grep LC_
>
> You should (unless you need to configure the locale stuff individually)
> set LC_ALL to <local>.utf8 (the same as you have set LANG).  You can set
> LANG to the same or set it to "C" (to default to the language for the
> locale).

I did not when I made the posting, but I tried it and it has made no 
difference. First I tried just LC_ALL=en_US.utf8 but that wasn't setting 
the other LC_* variables (at least not according to env). So I added them 
all to my /etc/env.d/ file and updated again. Here's my current env | grep 
LC_:

LC_PAPER=en_US.utf8
LC_ADDRESS=en_US.utf8
LC_MONETARY=en_US.utf8
LC_NUMERIC=en_US.utf8
LC_ALL=en_US.utf8
LC_TELEPHONE=en_US.utf8
LC_MESSAGES=en_US.utf8
LC_COLLATE=en_US.utf8
LC_IDENTIFICATION=en_US.utf8
LC_MEASUREMENT=en_US.utf8
LC_CTYPE=en_US.utf8
LC_TIME=en_US.utf8
LC_NAME=en_US.utf8

As a test I tried setting everything to just en_US and everything behaved 
fine (which makes sense). So it doesn't seem to be a missing env variable 
or anything..

>
> > P.S. What is ~/.kde/share/locale/ for? I have it but it is empty.
>
> That is probably for KDE -- my directory is also empty.  Perhaps you

OK. I asked because my kde install is creating the directory when I log in 
(I removed it once to test) whereas it doesn't exist, and never has, on my 
laptop where the locale stuff is unchanged.

Hmm. I guess I should say (since I didn't before) that the problem box (and 
also the laptop) run KDE 3.3.

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