Performance difference

[Dave Close]

I have two laptops with nearly identical hardware specs, both
running Fedora 36 with KDE and completely up-to-date on all software.
Both start in systemd's multi-user.target, KDE starts with a startx
command, Both are running Xorg ($XDG_SESSION_TYPE=""). In non-graphics
mode, their performance seems identical, quite snappy. However, they
do not perform similarly when KDE is running. Starting an application
or opening a new window involves a noticeable delay, sometimes as long
as 20 seconds, even if nothing else is happening at that time.

The only difference I've found thus far is that the slower one does not
have a swap partition. Any suggestions for what else I can check, and
hopefully fix, will be appreciated.

Here's some details on the two machines.

                   faster one                slower one
CPU (4 cores)    AMD Ryzen 3 3200U with    AMD Ryzen 3 3250U with
                 Radeon Vega Mobile Gfx    Radeon Graphics
Swap             zram0, sda3               zram0
fast.com speed      290 Mbps                  290 Mbps
bogomips             5190.47                   5189.93
MemTotal          3427804 kB                3404868 kB
MemFree            381772 kB                 483060 kB
MemAvailable       944388 kB                1007680 kB
Buffers                 4 kB                     56 kB
Cached             751824 kB                 702128 kB
SwapCached           1776 kB                   2180 kB
Active             546260 kB                 684744 kB
Inactive          1270360 kB                1112104 kB
Active(anon)        99512 kB                 189148 kB
Inactive(anon)     971252 kB                 907516 kB
Active(file)       446748 kB                 495596 kB
Inactive(file)     299108 kB                 204588 kB
Unevictable         14676 kB                    176 kB
Mlocked             14676 kB                    176 kB
SwapTotal        12068856 kB                3404796 kB
SwapFree         11531256 kB                2906364 kB
Dirty                2108 kB                      0 kB
Writeback               0 kB                      4 kB
AnonPages         1077772 kB                1092708 kB
Mapped              93480 kB                  93088 kB
Shmem                2280 kB                   2000 kB
KReclaimable        51176 kB                  49952 kB
Slab               164444 kB                 176112 kB
SReclaimable        51176 kB                  49952 kB
SUnreclaim         113268 kB                 126160 kB
KernelStack         15904 kB                  13064 kB
PageTables          37420 kB                  33732 kB
CommitLimit      13782756 kB                5107228 kB
Committed_AS      7497304 kB                6170592 kB
VmallocUsed        520416 kB                 527988 kB
Percpu              15488 kB                  14464 kB
DirectMap4k        351100 kB                 363212 kB
DirectMap2M       3254272 kB                3219456 kB
-- 
         Dave Close, Compata, Irvine CA       +1 714 434 7359
       dave at compata.com              dhclose at alumni.caltech.edu
   "Any idiot can face a crisis;
    it's the day-to-day living that wears you out." -- Anton Chekhov