I've got this bug where my plasma desktop slowly degrades over time. That is it starts out working fine and then over days the cursor responsiveness slowly changes from everything being perfectly smooth to things getting a little jerky and so on.

It's easy to fix, I just do the following and everything is good again:

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kquitapp5 plasmashell; plasmashell &

It could be one of my many widgets, it could be my 6 screen graphics card setup in an array of 3x2 and so on. I really don't want to be removing my widgets, wait, put back, remove another widget wait put back. Or try without screen blanking out or or or or.

What I would really like to do is monitor what's going on inside plasma, as if there was a utility like htop, (perhaps "plasmatop" would be a good name) that showed what was over time chewing up more and more time inside plasma so I could more precisely deal with the problem. The only thing I have found so far that might help is "perf" but I am not qualified to know if that's the best approach, nor do I have any experience with it so I might not know how to interpret the results even if I do use it. But, perhaps it is the best starting point?

So, are there any good tips on really pinpointing a problem instead of a basic "trial and error" approach?

Usually I just try the same thing on different computers, users, and OSes, with different configurations, in different combinations. But another method is just to post the output of that command, and see what programs it mentions.

A year and bit later I am finally getting around to actually doing the troubleshooting on this matter. I thought I would just ask if anyone has anything to add since so much time has gone by and perhaps some new tools are available now?