KDE4 slow on thinclients (video)

[Martin Vogt]

Hello,

> The connection between the thinclients <-> SuSE 11b3 is Gigabit. (The
> thinclients have gig-E).
> The machine with the SuSE 11.1b3 is a Core 2 E8400 with 2GB RAM and a
> NVidia PCi-e FX570.
> (8800 chipset)
>
>> yes, X. the question is why, and i'd like to start with the driver before
>> exploring further inside of plasma itself.
>
> I will now do the Test with the knoppix.
>

I have successfully booted the thinclient with the geode CPU with
Knoppix 5.3. Overall with the new X11 server and all these other new
things which
knoppix has onboard its now a bit faster, but nothing to be happy with. :-(

Im still debugging it, but I think I found something  else(!).

I have straced (ltrace didnt work btw--why?) the plasma process:

while true ; do strace -p <pidofplasma>; done

(while .. done necessary because some threads exits after a while)

You can  watch when you "click around" on the desktop
that plasma scans _thousands_ files)

This is very reproducible:(run the strace above in a shell)

- open an xterm with ALT F2
- make a right click on desktop
- open another xterm with alt f2
- move the tranparent window or some other windows around
- make a right click on the desktop etc....

it repeats the directroy scanning over and over again.
The syscall is always similiar to this:

access("/usr/share/icons/oxygen/16x16/devices/unknown.png", R_OK) = -1
ENOENT (No such file or directory)
access("/usr/share/icons/hicolor/scalable/apps/xterm.xpm", R_OK) = -1
ENOENT (No such file or directory)
....thousand more...

I clicked some times between the xterms/background/other windows
etc... not much, maybe 10 clicks or so .

I piped the output of strace into a file and counted:

demo3 at pxe1:~/Documents> grep "/usr/share/icons" /tmp/a.dbg | wc -l
68850

Every time when there was a "lack" between the right click on the desktop
or the moving of the tranparent windows it did these excessive
scans for some icons.(after the scan was complete the widget moves or
pops up)
Simply run the script above and you will see :-)

(kde 4.1.2 on suse 11.1b3)

regards,

Martin