Hello,

I'm using Dolphin in Mageia 5 with KDE 4.14.35. I've looked in all of the usual places that I know of and done all of the testing that I know how to do, and still can't figure out what is causing a 6-7 second pause after right clicking in the white space of a folder, or on a folder. It doesn't stall on any other file type, just directories. It doesn't affect all users, the guest user account is nice and smooth. Also, right clicking while watching Ksysguard shows Dolphin writing near 5MB per second in the IO write column and a single CPU core goes to 100%. I did find that it is writing an error to the xsession-errors log, sometimes, but it does not write to the log every time, and it does stall every time. If anyone has a clue I'd sure appreciate your suggestions. Thank you.

This is the error in the log and it only happens in directories with a .directory file in them. I believe those are Dolphin settings from viewing the folders with individual folder settings. Deleting them makes the error go away but the stall remains. Also, the IO write is still present when it is not writing to xsession-errors.

Code: Select all

dolphin(25471)/kdecore (services) KServicePrivate::init: The desktop entry file  "/home/mike/.directory"  has Type= "Application"  but no Exec line

Some ideas:
Do you have any custom service menus installed and enabled? (check in Dolphin Settings -> Services (there should be a bunch of items which come built-in) and in ~/.kde/share/kde4/services/ServiceMenus/ (for service menus you may have written or downloaded using the Download new Services button on the aforementioned Services pane). If so, does disabling some of them change anything?
Do you have any remote servers or network drives mounted in your home directory (or possibly other places on your system which could possibly impact this)?
If you switch to using common properties for all folders, how does this change things?

airdrik wrote:Some ideas:
Do you have any custom service menus installed and enabled? (check in Dolphin Settings -> Services (there should be a bunch of items which come built-in) and in ~/.kde/share/kde4/services/ServiceMenus/ (for service menus you may have written or downloaded using the Download new Services button on the aforementioned Services pane). If so, does disabling some of them change anything?
Do you have any remote servers or network drives mounted in your home directory (or possibly other places on your system which could possibly impact this)?
If you switch to using common properties for all folders, how does this change things?

Hello,

Thank you for the suggestions. I do have custom service menus but I removed them. I wrote a couple that popup EXIF info for photos using Kdialog in a ready to copy format suitable for posting online. I also unchecked all of the built-in services, removed network shares and tried common folder view mode. I did have 8 custom places, but I just now converted them into one with a link in Places that opens a folder of shortcuts. Doing that did shorten the stall but I'm certain whatever is causing the 100% CPU spike is the cause.

I've studied Dolphin an awful lot. Dolphin checks to see if the folder is already in Places and if it is, Add to Places will not be on the context menu. Dolphin will allow you to drag a duplicate to places, so that check is more of a notification. Konqueror just flies even with a lot of custom places. I remember how upset I was when they switched to Dolphin but after learning about all of its features I've grown to love it. I could use Konqueror but I'm one of those guys who likes to know why and I'd like to sort it out for others.

Oh, something else. Using Dolphin opened as root is fast, and switching users is the same. I'm convinced that it's something linked in my account and I don't know what all is accessed differently for different users. I know it uses a different .kde4 and .config and .local folder, but I don't know if Dolphin uses different folders outside the home folder for different users. If I knew everything it accessed differently based on the user I might be able to find it. I just had a thought. There may be different fonts in use for different users and those would be outside the home folder. Again, thank you very much for the suggestions and I'm going to continue investigating the problem. It seems to work correctly using any account but mine and that leads me to believe it's fixable.

184,171 lines!!! Wow!

I have solved this, somewhat. My bookmarks.xml file in /home/john/.kde4/share/apps/kfileplaces/ has 184,171 lines of entries in it!!!

That's right, near 200,000 lines in that file. That explains the high CPU usage and I/O when right clicking. It was searching the huge file checking to see if the current folder was already in Places. I say it's somewhat fixed because it's working correctly now with plenty of speed but there are a few unknowns. I was working on another machine today that makes duplicate links in Places. Every time you open Dolphin it makes a whole new set of links in Places. That machine and mine are both running fully updated Mageia 5, basically identical as far as KDE system file versions anyway. According to what I found it's related to Homerun and I do use Homerun, but I don't get duplicates on my machine, or at least I don't get duplicates that are displayed. It appears that the patch that fixed the duplicate issue in Homerun only stopped displaying them but it continues to create them. I could be wrong on that though.

What I am not wrong about is the fact that my bookmarks.xml file was 4.6 MBs in size and was the cause of my 100% CPU spike and slow right click context menu. I deleted the file and it came right back so I logged out and deleted it from a console. When I logged back in it did not reappear and everything is nice and speedy. I have learned an awful lot about how all of this Dolphin stuff works but it's not anywhere near what the programmers know. They will have to figure out how this happens.

I was using Homerun Kicker 1.2.5, not the full screen one but the menu version, and Dolphin 4.14.3. I'm going to see if I can run Homerun Kicker without the full screen version installed because another machine is using Kicker and doesn't have duplicate issues or a huge bookmarks.xml file. I will post anything I find and if anyone has information about this issue please post it. I just happen to have 3 machines here today to compare everything and one is a friend's with a clean install. It's the one that was duplicating Places links today. I looked at that file a zillion times but didn't pay attention to the size. I was looking for damaged files or plugins or services or something because nothing was wrong except for the speed. I sure hope this information helps some of you because I have a lot of time invested in this. Also, even if you do not seem to have a problem ,check it. With a good fast CPU and an SSD you could have a growing bookmarks.xml file that will be a problem in the future and is slowing you down right now. Good luck.

Ah, you ran into the bug described here: viewtopic.php?f=224&t=126866

Short story: Homerun Kicker had a bug; fixed in the 5.x series of Plasma, but those of us still on 4.x get no love and so the bug remains and makes that launcher unusable (which is unfortunate as there is a nice simplicity to Homerun Kicker when compared to Kickoff).

airdrik wrote:Ah, you ran into the bug described here: viewtopic.php?f=224&t=126866

Short story: Homerun Kicker had a bug; fixed in the 5.x series of Plasma, but those of us still on 4.x get no love and so the bug remains and makes that launcher unusable (which is unfortunate as there is a nice simplicity to Homerun Kicker when compared to Kickoff).

Yes, I did. And that is absolutely the short story. After lot of reading I'm not sure what version introduced the bug, or if it was the addition if the XDG menu standards and there are a few people besides me who are confused. I'm also not sure which version is supposed to work properly. I do know removing Homerun Kicker and deleting bookmarks.xml fix the issue if you do it while KDE is not running and have already uninstalled Kicker. From there I'm giving up becdause it's supposed to be fixed and we'll get those updates soon enough. Thank you for taking the time to assist.

I can say that it is fixed in KDE 5. However, those of us still on KDE 4 get no love (unless there's someone willing to backport the fixed version(s) needed, which isn't likely as I think we may be past KDE 4's support lifetime. Possibly talk to your distro's maintainers?).

I'll ask a couple people I know. Also, I read that there is a patch and I'm pretty good at picking through code. I used to program some back in the old days, 35 years ago. But things sort of took off and left me due to a busy life etc. I've always wanted to get back into real programming and I just need to buy a couple of books and get busy. If you remember Kweather, it would display the temperature like 77*F and took up a lot of space. I hacked on it so that it only displayed the 77. Of course, the Homerun code is going to be more complicated than that bu that's just more study to understand it.

I don't have Homerun in Mageia 6 at all and the menu in it looks very much like Homerun Kicker. It has the favorites down the side of the menu and the search box and everything. Right click the menu button and it has settings. In there you can set it to scroll programs or do the More> thing. It is called Application Launcher, I think. Anyway, I though it was Homerun Kicker so check it out in your distro or find a package that'll install in yours.

I installed OpenSUSE Leap 42.3. in a VM and was really impressed. Mandrake, Mandriva and now Mageia, I call them M, have all had the MCC, Mandrake Control Center, Mandria Control Center, and Mageia Control Center. SUSE has YaST and it's really nice. If I were to switch, I think it'd be to OpenSUSE. It runs the same version of Plasma 5 and does't have Homerun Kicker either. I don't know if they made another menu widget that looks like it or if they changed the name, but they're identical, visual wise anyway. Mageia also has a backports repository but I don't know if Homerun is in it.

Going back and checking the history, Kicker was forked back when Plasma 5 was started and is included in the plasma-desktop repository.
Comparing the two, it looks like the original Homerun Kicker was updated up to version 1.2.5 using KDE+Qt 4 and has had only one minor change since, while the version included in Plasma 5 has had significant changes to it, including being ported to KDE+Qt 5.

If you can do without KDE/Plasma 4 then just use the menu included with Plasma 5. If you are bound to Plasma 4 then feel free to delve in and try to fix the original Kicker. I'd recommend reviewing the thread I linked before where the actual bug was discussed as that will give you some pointers for what will need to be fixed. Good luck!