Since upgrading to KDE 4, login times are really slow. It can take anything from 15 - 30 seconds from entering your password until you have a usable desktop. And I don't mean from when the background image shows, and KDE "pretends" to be ready, but from when I can use it (i.e. open the start menu, start programs, etc).

Is there anything you can do, or is KDE 4 supposed to be slower than anything else (even Windows is faster...).

I've made myself a new .kde directory without any improvement. I've tried disabling "startup services" from:
System Settings -> Startup and Shutdown -> Service Manager

I also deleted everything in /etc/xdg/autostart/.

When I log in, it looks like it is done, but it is just waiting for something in the system tray to start. The only things there are "printer applet", which I don't need, and device notifier, which I could live without (if it's the one that slow). Then there is klipper and volume control.

I recently upgraded to KDE 4.6, but it's still frightfully slow.

Is there anything else you can do to make it start faster?

Making that list, I realized that klipper (an inherently slow application in KDE 4 it seems) was on the list, so I tried disabling that. It might have been one of the culprits. The login seemed a bit faster this time. But I'll have to check a few more times.

Ha! I found another dreaded autostart directory. There's lots of junk in /usr/share/autostart as well. I now deleted everything except:
kmix_autostart.desktop
krunner.desktop
plasma.desktop
plasma-desktop.desktop
restore_kmix_volumes.desktop
xsettings-kde.desktop

Everything else seemed redundant. I'm not sure about the two plasma files. I'll check that.

Well.... After removing klipper, a couple of quick logout/logins seemed faster (around 10 seconds for login), but when trying the only important measurement, i.e. a login after a fresh reboot, KDE still failed.

First login after a fresh reboot did not take 15-30 seconds but 60 seconds!!!!

Why? What's so slow in KDE 4? Are there more hidden locations with strange autostart programs?

I have used KDE 4 from 4.1 version and have Gentoo-linux and rebuild some packages often. It leads to high filesystem realocation and after ~5 years I have meet strong slowdown of my boot process including login.
Solution:
1. boot from side source(live CD, or other system)
2. move root partition-data to another store( WARNING: you MUST keep file premissions )
3. clean old root partion with mkfs.ext{2,3,4}
4. move root partion-data back
5. ejoy speedup!

may be this will be useful fo you.

@Rubens: Check the permissions of /var/tmp/kdecache-$USER/ and try removing it. Also, ensure you have plenty of free disk space. In addition, how much RAM does your system have?

Can you check processes when you are logging in, by switching to console terminals (Ctrl-Alt-F1) and using "top" to see if "polkitd" is using a lot of CPU? I see this problem sometimes on my netbook (but not on my main desktops).

bcooksley wrote:@Rubens: Check the permissions of /var/tmp/kdecache-$USER/ and try removing it. Also, ensure you have plenty of free disk space. In addition, how much RAM does your system have?

The permissions looked ok, but I removed /var/tmp/kdecache* and rebooted. Still slow.

The root disk is 66% used, with 6.3 GB available. I might try the "move all data, format partition, move it all back" trick, just to see if that could be the cause.

I have 4 GB of RAM in the machine.

I also tried running top in a console during the login process. I saw nothing strange, and nothing used more than a few percent of CPU time. The only unusual thing I saw was that akonadi_control was running with maybe 100 processes in parallel for a little time.

But during the long wait after the desktop is up but nothing reacts to mouse clicks, I saw nothing at all.

Can you install "iotop" and see whether the slowness is caused by disk I/O?

einar wrote:Can you install "iotop" and see whether the slowness is caused by disk I/O?

I've done that but can't find anything particular. First, right after logging in, akonadi seems to be doing a lot of stuff. After that nothing. Then nothing. Then nothing. And then kmix and krunner and other stuff run, after which the system is usable.