Plasma-desktop becoming very slow

[Stephan Diestelhorst]

Hi Duncan, 

Am Sonntag 10 Juni 2012, 12:22:03 schrieb Duncan:
> Stephan Diestelhorst posted on Fri, 08 Jun 2012 09:25:23 +0200 as
> excerpted:
> 
> >   after leaving my system running for a while with virtuoso-t eating
> > some CPU, virtuoso-t eventually finishes and everything is fine.
> > 
> > However, although the CPU load stays very low, plasma-desktop is *very*
> > slow.  Clicking on the virtual desktops in the bar will switch the
> > desktop after sevaral minutes(!), and the list of windows is not really
> > updated.  Also, Alt + F2 takes approx. 45 secs to open the krunner
> > dialog.
> > 
> > Switching desktops with Ctrl + F1 is fast and the respective
> > applications work fine, too.
> > 
> > This is on Kubuntu 11.10 with KDE 4.8.2.
> > 
> > Any ideas how to fix this?
> 
> How I fixed the general problem honestly isn't going to be easy for 
> people running most binary distros, tho you can try part of it and see if 
> only that part works.
> 
> I run gentoo, which is a scripted build-from-sources distro that 
> emphasizes giving the local system admin the choice to turn build-time 
> optional features on or off as desired, via what they call USE flags.  

Been there, done that.  In particular the USE-flag thing and too many
rebuild-depends. :-)

> Here, I turned the semantic-desktop USE flag off, rebuilt the various 
> parts of kde depending on it (and switched to something else for anything 
> kdepim related as that all depends on akonadi, which in turn depends on 
> semantic-desktop, so kmail replaced with claws-mail, etc), and uninstalled 
> all the semantic-desktop related components, including nepomuk, virtuoso, 
> redland, rasqal, etc.

Yes, but I *like* kmail. It just needs to get more stable search
support.

> The half-way alternative that you can try without having to do your own 
> builds is simply turning off as much of semantic-desktop as you can.  
> Here, that helped some, but not as much as building entirely without it 
> and uninstalling the various no longer needed components.

Thanks for the suggestion! I had hoped that killing nepomukserver with
qdbus should have done the trick... But that didn't help.  I will look
at memory consumption when things get slow again, maybe it is a swap
issue.  It is just strange that the plasma-desktop is affected, while
the actual applications (including kmail IIRC were operating properly).

> Since I did this back with early 4.7, I don't know how much of the 
> controls have changed since then, but in kde system settings there should 
> be an option to either simply disable indexing (or tell strigi to not 
> index certain directories while leaving it on, YMMV), or to turn off 
> nepomuk entirely.  Do note that if you run kmail or anything else using 
> akonadi, turning off nepomuk turns off some functionality there, too.

Indeed, that's why (search in kmail!) I have kept them on so far.

> As for krunner, you can click the wrench icon there, and turn off various 
> of its addons.  Look for options like searching in mail, etc, that are 
> semantic-desktop related.  It's likely that one of them is eating the 
> krunner cycles, and turning it off, once you find the option doing it, 
> should speed up krunner dramatically, entirely separate from turning of 
> nepomuk, etc, above.  (There was a bug in one of those krunner addons 
> some kde versions ago and turning off one of the krunner addons was a 
> suggested workaround, but that was 4.6 era and I don't recall which one 
> it was, except that searching in mail seems to ring a bell so that might 
> be it.  I turned off several I didn't need, including that one, and it 
> /was/ faster, so it was a good suggestion for me. =:^)

I think I tweaked those in 4.7, early 4.8 days, too.  :-)

Let me keep the box running for a while and see if the problem comes
back.

Stephan

___________________________________________________
This message is from the kde mailing list.
Account management:  https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/kde.
Archives: http://lists.kde.org/.
More info: http://www.kde.org/faq.html.