I first experienced this problem when trying to save a file in Chrome. I looked into how the save dialog was being created and found it was running a command similar to below.

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kdialog -title="Save File" --getsavefilename /home/jferner/

If I run this on the command line I get the same problem. The dialog pops up but remains all gray for ~20 seconds and then shows the directory as empty with a progress bar in the bottom left then a dialog pops up saying that it's not responding. If I cancel out of the not responding dialog kdialog never recovers.

This is quite unusual. Does a "Open File" dialog in an application such as KWrite work properly?

bcooksley wrote:This is quite unusual. Does a "Open File" dialog in an application such as KWrite work properly?

Yes open and save dialogs in KWrite work fine. What I noticed though is that when I have the open or save dialogs open in KWrite and I run "ps -Af | grep -i dialog" I do not see kdialog in the list. But when the save dialog "opens" (but doesn't respond) in Chrome I do see kdialog in the list.

KWrite uses KDE dialogs and other systems natively, so it does not need a separate process as Chrome/Chromium does.
Just as a test - do you see this issue in applications such as VLC as well?

bcooksley wrote:KWrite uses KDE dialogs and other systems natively, so it does not need a separate process as Chrome/Chromium does.
Just as a test - do you see this issue in applications such as VLC as well?

Yes this problem occurs with other programs as well.

Which version of KDE are you using?
You may be suffering (somehow) from the issue described at http://git.reviewboard.kde.org/r/100539/

Same issue. Usually appears in a couple of hours after the system starts. KDE 4.8.2 (Kubuntu 12.04). Same system at home, haven't noticed any dialog freezing behavior there.
When the issue activates, it is sufficient to execute

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kdialog -title="Save File" --getsavefilename /home/denisk

to reproduce it. Log out cures the issue (for some time).
Can I provide any logs/debug info?

Can you try running the kdialog command under strace, to see where it is getting stuck?
Also, (while not under strace) try attaching a debugger to it once it is stuck and generating a backtrace.

This may be helpful in determining what component is locking up.

During the last week I haven't noticed the issue happening again. I assume it was fixed by one of the daily updates. If I notice it again however, I'll post back with all necessary debugging info.

Okay. I've marked it as solved for now - feel free to unmark it as solved if you manage to reproduce the issue again.

I experienced the same issue.
For me it was caused by unreachable mounted NFS directory

Same happens to me. Following some of the comments here, I realized that when KDialog gets stuck, there's a CIFS mount which has problems (server down, network error or such). In fact, if I go to Dolphin and try to browse this mount, it gets stuck too. If I do a dmesg, I see "[18135.108903] CIFS VFS: Unexpected lookup error -112".

So, it seems that the problem here is a faulty mount that keeps KDialog waiting. Anyway, perhaps KDialog could use some kind of (shorter) timeout, or it should access mounted shares only as needed, not at startup.

In this case, the timeout is not controlled by KDE in any manner, but instead by the kernel or file system driver you have used to mount the network share into the system. In regards to not accessing the devices at startup - it is probably trying to determine the free disk space (which Dolphin stopped doing - hence why it is not affected until you try to access the mount). As far as I am aware, this behaviour cannot be deactivated at runtime unfortunately - you would need to alter the code in question.

I am too suffering from the (nfs server not responding -> KDialog open File dialog freezing). Any workarounds ? pointers to how to change the code ?

thanks,

Dror

There are no known workarounds for the issue i'm afraid, other than ensuring the NFS shares which are mounted are always responsive.
The file dialog code can be found in kdelibs/kio/kfile I believe. If you have any other questions regarding the codebase, I would suggest sending them to kde-devel@kde.org as the people there are likely to be more knowledgeable in regards to it.