plasma-desktop (KDE factory) acting up?

[Alex Schuster]

Duncan writes:

> With 4.5.x here (currently 4.5.2 but I'm not sure if it was 4.5.2 when
> this happened), I triggered something rather similar when I started
> experimenting with adding activities, etc (it was for a reply to a list
> post, in fact), and I had a plasma crash (initial plasma crash due to a
> graphics related kernel bug on my particular hardware).  After a couple
> plasma crashes (triggered by the kernel bug), it was as if plasma
> decided to create new versions of about three activities every time it
> was restarted (new kde start, graceful plasma terminate and restart,
> crash, didn't matter now), PLUS remembering the activities it had
> before, so I very quickly developed a whole slew of activities.

I'm also having plasma trouble. Plasmoids tend to not remember their 
position and sizes, expecially folder plasmoids, but that's a minor 
problem. What causes much more trouble is that my activities get mixed up. 
I have one activity per desktop, and suddenly most desktops have the wrong 
activity. This has happened for 3-4 times now.


> I don't know what was causing it (after the initial trigger, anyway,
> other than presumably plasma doesn't react as well as it might to a
> partially corrupted config), but I have a heavily enough customized
> plasma setup that I didn't want to lose all of it with a clean config,
> so I was quite reluctant to go that route.

I did this some months ago, hoping that those many, many bugs are the 
result of some configs that got corrupted along the updates from KDE 4.2 
to 4.3, 4.4 and 4.5. Some things were fixed indeed, but most problems 
stayed. This took half a day of work, so I'd hate to do this again 
whenever a KDE problem arises.

Maybe my setup is just over-complicated? When I look at screenshots of 
people using KDE4, they often only have two desktops. Well, I have eight 
desktops and activities, in case someone is interested, there are some 
screnshots here:
http://www.wonkology.org/comp/desktop/2010-06-19/

The current setup is a little different, but not much. After login, I have 
kontact running, many chromium windows/tabs, tvbrowser (java) which uses 
an awful lot of memory, amarok and kmymoney. Some plasmoids, some other 
tools, like gkrellm and such. When I work with the system, I occasionally 
start things like oowriter, gimp or gwenview, and don't quit immediately 
when I am done. This needs some memory, but I think when I do not touch 
the application, most of it should get swapped out when RAM gets low, and 
should be no trouble. Of course I get a delay when I start using it again 
as the application needs to get swapped in, that's okay.

My setup is so slow, for nearly a year I am thinking about dumping KDE4 
altogether - if it weren't so cool. And if I hadn't already put much time 
into tuning and configuration. With 4G of RAM is becomes unusable pretty 
soon, and even with 6G I get 2G of swap after a while. Well, at least part 
of this comes from a memory problem in plasma-desktop I think. Since I 
moved from 4.5.1 to 4.5.2, plasma-desktop started acting weirder. When I 
log in, or when I restart plasma-desktop manually, it takes minutes until 
the plasma stuff appears. During this phase, memory usage of the process 
climbs upwards until it reaches agout 1G, according to the RES column in 
top. And for some days now it crashes very often when I am using the comic 
plasmoid, which is not of much use anyway, because moreand more of the 
comics just do not work any more. When I close the plasmoid, memory usage 
is the same, so this is not the problem.

When I started with KDE 4.2, my setup was quite similar. I had only 3.5G 
of RAM and an i686 system instead of amd64 now (that hardware is 
identical), and there was no memory problem. I even added a 2G tmpfs 
sometimes in order to do compiles in memory. Things became a little slow 
when I used an application that needed 1.5G of memory, but performance was 
still better than now.

I'm using Gentoo Linux, so there is much compiling being done. I no longer 
do larger updates while I am working with the system, because of the 
slowdown. And it becomes especially annoying when watching movies or 
listening to music with amarok, and the sound stutters. All this was no 
problem at all one year ago.

I installed KDE 3.5 just to compare, and it seems to be much faster. But I 
got used to KDE 4, and would not want to switch back. Maybe I will, if 
things will not become better soon. First I will add another 2G of memory, 
and let's see if 8G will be enough then to make KDE4 run fast.


> So I used the bisect method to track it down to a specific file, then
> dove into that file with a text editor...

I've done this a couple of this, too. Very tedious, but better than 
starting from scratch.

[...]

> However, once I reached the individual file, which in at least my case
> was $KDEHOME/share/config/plasma-desktop-appletsrc, I *STILL* had a
> huge amount of customization invested in the thing that I didn't want
> to lose. Basically, it appears that file contains the ENTIRE plasma
> desktop config, ALL activities, ALL panels, ALL plasmoids on those
> panels!  That's a *LOT* of config to lose, for a heavy customizer such
> as myself.  (IOW, I really / do/ hope they make it a directory tree
> based config at some point, with a top level file at the top of the
> tree, describing each panel and activity, with a subdir for each one. 
> Each subdir would then contain further files and perhaps subdirs of
> its own, if it represents a container plasmoid, so ultimately, losing
> or corrupting a single file isn't such a huge loss!)
>
> So I had little choice but to continue with the text editor in that
> file itself.  Unfortunately, while the layout is text oriented, the
> file isn't exactly designed to be easy to edit manually, as every
> widget is numbered, and one has to manually track down what each
> numbered element represents. Some are easier than others as they
> contain names or other config hints, but it can still be difficult if
> there's multiple instances of a widget configured -- say multiple
> panels, or multiple activities, as one then has to sort out not just
> that it's an activity, but which one.

I also found this file when analyzing why my activities were on the wrong 
desktops. I was able to fix this manually for some times by exchanging 
some of the numbers. When it happened again, I simply restored a backup 
copy of this file.

Oh, speaking of backups: I make lots of them. I never save the session 
without making one of my ~/.kde4 directory, because it often does not work 
and all applications open on the first desktop, for example. Or the 
plasmoids are all mixed up again.

BTW, what I am missing is a possibility to move plasmoids around to other 
desktops/activities. Or is there already another method than deleting and 
re-creating a plasmoid? I'd also like the option to make them sticky on 
all activities, similar to windows being visible on all desktops. Even 
better would be the possibility to select multiple desktops/activities for 
plasmoids and windows.

Oh, and plasma-desktop just crashed again, when I gave the comic plasmoid 
anopther try. After 4 1/2 minutes, des desktop is back, and plasma-desktop 
takes 1.3G of memory. And I suddenly have a minimized 'JavaEmbeddedFrame' 
in my panel which I cannot maximize. It disappeared after a while.

Well, time to log out and in again, as I do every 1-2 days in order to 
make KDE4 fast again, at least for a while until the swapping starts 
again.

Sigh,
	Wonko
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