My employer just upgraded from RH 7.3 to RHEL 4. The version of KDE is 3.3. Now our workstation login is incredibly slow. I'm talking 6-8 minutes everytime I sign on. It's the same for other users and our SysAdmins aren't doing much.

When this happens, I see the big KDE 3.3 box in the middle of the screen. I see several tools blink on in succession from left to right. Then I see just a blank screen for 5 or more minutes then login completes as expected.

Speculations are that some process times out and then login completes or some database is being built each time instead of just the initial login.

What can I do to determine the cause of this problem? Don't say upgrade to later versions of Linux and/or KDE. That's beyond my control. Also, I don't have root access but if I have advice I can tell the SysAdmins what to try.

This will help out 12-15 very frustrated people, not just me. Thanks for all advice and help.

I did try a search for "slow login" before posting here.

You might be dealing with a upgrade issue from a previous much older version of KDE. If you move the ~/.kde folder to ~/.kde-disabled outside a KDE session, then log in to KDE does it make a difference?

bcooksley wrote:You might be dealing with a upgrade issue from a previous much older version of KDE. If you move the ~/.kde folder to ~/.kde-disabled outside a KDE session, then log in to KDE does it make a difference?

Yes, it had an effect. When I next logged in it took 25 minutes to build the files seen in ~/.kde/share/config. There after it would log-in in about 50-60 seconds. Now my employer has our home directories NSF mounted and every time I log in to a new machine, it seems to take 5-7 minutes. Some of the content is rebuilt. How do I get the share directory to truly share? Or am I reading this all wrong?

Log in, log out, log in on the same machine is about 1 minute for login, change to another machine and it seems longer. Do I have to go around the room and log into every machine at least once?

Thanks for the tip.

I suspect that each time you newly login to a machine it has to regenerate the cache. This is located at /var/tmp/kdecache-$user, and is linked to from ~/.kde/cache-$hostname

Since each machine is likely the same, it should be possible to share the cache between all the machines.
Try this approach. Performing step three on each machine involved.

Code: Select all

rm ~/.kde/cache-*
mkdir ~/.kde/kde-cache/
ln -s ~/.kde/kde-cache ~/.kde/cache-$('hostname')