plasma-desktop using 100% of 1 core

Thu May 17 05:43:30 BST 2012

Barry Scott posted on Wed, 16 May 2012 17:37:02 +0100 as excerpted:

> On Wednesday 16 May 2012 18:14:40 Alex Schuster wrote:
>> Barry Scott writes:
>> 
>> > After a forced reboot of my Fedora 16 system I am seeing
>> > plasma-desktop use 100% of 1 core after a while. Killing
>> > plasma-desktop and starting it up again is a temporary work around.
>> 
>> Does plasma still react, or is it frozen?
> 
> It reacts very slowly.

FWIW...

For technical reasons related to qt4, the choice (which I don't really 
agree with but I'm not the one doing the coding so it's not my say, it 
was certainly the easiest choice to make, but not the most robust) was 
made to run all of plasma, including all plasmoids/widgets, as a single-
threaded app.  That means that if one freezes or goes into an endless 
loop, plasma itself quits responding.

This wasn't exactly the best choice possible in terms of robustness, for 
an app designed to be extensible with plugins (plasmoids in this case) 
written by all sorts of people of various levels of expertise, as can be 
found on for example kde-look, which is fully integrated into kde via the 
get-hot-new-stuff APIs.

Whatever.  The result is that if plasma continues responding, you know at 
least that it's not a fully locked-up plasmoid.  But one may still be 
taking all the CPU available to it, which seems to be your situation.

If you've loaded any plasmoids from kde-look and you decide to see which 
plasmoid it might be, those are the the ones I'd try removing first, 
since presumably, those that ship with kde, and any others packaged by 
your distro, should be rather more highly quality-checked.

But in the case of an unclean shutdown, it could be any of them that 
write to disk, which since the configuration is written to disk, would be 
most of them.  Chances are, one of those bits written to disk got 
corrupted in the unclean shutdown.  If you can find and delete, restore 
from backup, or manually cleanup via editing, the corrupt file, you 
should be back to normal operation without having to reset your whole 
customized setup.

Also check the plasma-desktop-appletsrc file, as wonko/alex mentions.  
Unfortunately, this file contains most of the config for nearly all 
plasmoids, containers and activities, including their layout, and while 
nominally in standard plaintext *.ini file format the file's section 
dependencies are complex to say the least, so if this file gets corrupted 
and you don't have a backup, you often end up simply deleting it and 
having to reconfigure all activities and panels from default.

The moral of the story is, keep a backup of that file!

Meanwhile...

> Brry <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0//EN"
> "http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/strict.dtd">
> <html><head><meta name="qrichtext" content="1" /><style type="text/css">

Please avoid posting in HTML to the lists.  Keep it plain text and 
everyone stays happy. =:^)

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman

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