Ark (or rather the kio_archive) really can't handle largish archives at all, trying to unpack this archive http://build.chromium.org/buildbot/arch ... rball.html

just fails, sometimes even locking the system, file-roller has no problems with it

I would suggest filing a bug report at bugs.kde.org regarding this, assuming you are running KDE 4.3 or later ( Trunk )

I did, I actually found out this weekend that doing any kind of large file operation freezes kde almost completely whilst doing the same in gnome is no problem I can still move the cursor and switch vt but all apps seem frozen, looking at top show no sign of high cpu usage even though even the vt is slow

This is likely Disk IO. I would recommend disabling tree view if you are trying to use that.

bcooksley wrote:This is likely Disk IO. I would recommend disabling tree view if you are trying to use that.

you might be right but how do I disable treeview in ark (or dolphin for that matter)? (edit: found it in dolphin/konqueror it was off already though ark still uses tree view for archieves)

btw why doesn't it only read on entering a dir, seems far less intensive?

The reason this occurs is because for every transaction ( ie. every folder list operation ) a new kio slave is spawned. Tree view attempts to perform a file listing for many directories at once, which for a source tarball would likely be far too great for this model to handle.

bcooksley wrote:The reason this occurs is because for every transaction ( ie. every folder list operation ) a new kio slave is spawned. Tree view attempts to perform a file listing for many directories at once, which for a source tarball would likely be far too great for this model to handle.

This really doesnt seem like a very smart thing to do even in general, why not just do it on demand?

and how do I workaround it because I can't find any options in ark...

Unfortunately I believe that Ark is based around the Tree View. I do not know if Ark uses KIO to access archives, however.

I am not at a kde system now so can't check the exact names but when opening an archive both with ark or dolphin I see some kio_archive processes taking a lot of cpu and some kio_file processes using only a few % cpu

It appears that Ark uses KIO then. In this case, it is the kio_archive slave itself, or the libraries it utilises which are inefficient in their handling of large archives.

I would recommend filing a bug report aganist it.

I did a while ago but no response yet
https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=212332