Hi,

I have a very annoying problem, I'd like to solve if we can. Can anyone offer any suggestions?

I have OpenSuSE 11.4 + KDE 4.6 and after submitting my login credential, my desktop (wallpaper etc) appears but although the mouse moves, in all other respects the system seems frozen for a full 20 seconds or so. Most annoying!

How can I track the source of this down. I have been hunting through my log files but the only sightly suspicious entries I can find are these from /var/log/messages :

Code: Select all

... # all above, filtered out
Oct 12 09:21:15 gzunder smartd[2939]: smartd has fork()ed into background mode. New PID=2939.
Oct 12 09:21:15 gzunder kernel: [   50.804634] eth0: no IPv6 routers present
Oct 12 09:21:27 gzunder checkproc: checkproc: can not get session id for process 3123!
Oct 12 09:21:34 gzunder kernel: [   69.223494] start_kdeinit (3244): /proc/3244/oom_adj is deprecated, please use /proc/3244/oom_score_adj instead.
Oct 12 09:21:34 gzunder su: (to mprowe) root on none
... # all below filtered

I'm guessing that the entries are written after the event(?), so the first two (@ 09:21:15) end a rapid sequence of actions. I don't have an IPv6 router and IPv6 is off on this client. So it seems that there is a 12 second gap to the next event at 09:21:27 and another 7 seconds to the start_kdeinit line.
The last line is me opening the file manager as SU.

If all the above is spurious, any suggestions to increase the logging during the KDE startup will be most welcome.

Regards, Martin

> Oct 12 09:21:34 gzunder kernel: [ 69.223494] start_kdeinit (3244): /proc/3244/oom_adj is deprecated, please use /proc/3244/oom_score_adj instead.

The kernel is killing a process because it ran out of memory. When you login some process starts to eat memory as fast as it can, slowing your startup time. So, you should track your processes memory consumption.

dpalacio wrote:So, you should track your processes memory consumption.

Ooo... Cryptic!
Can you help a newbe out by giving me some pointers?
Track memory?
Which processes?
During desktop loading, before I can run any diags?

Regards, Martin

On a virtual terminal (Control alt f1), run `top`.

Thank you for your suggestions. However, that still leaves me a little confused...

If I am trying to track down an errant process that stalls and gets killed off during the KDE desktop start-up, isn't it a bit late to find it interactively with "top"?

With my limited understanding of these things; should I not be looking to set a debug/log switch. Then rerun the KDE Desktop, wait for the freeze to clear (as I have to do now) and then examine the record of events that have happened before the GUI becomes available?

Regards, Martin

you might try kdebugdialog - run it, select all and hit ok then reboot and after booting look at ~/.xsession-errors

might be a very large file

google01103 wrote:you might try kdebugdialog

Thanks for the suggestion. Sounds interesting?

However, after a week of playing, I can't detect any difference in the quantity or topic of the information in ~/.xsession-errors? The same (sorta) information is listed with or without kdebugdialog switched on.

Tried kdebugdialog -fullmode. That got a little confusing. And I was unable to generate a kdebug.dbg file - surely something must be complaining on my system sufficiently badly to want to create a log entry?

Still confused, Martin