Registered Member
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Since I have too little info on the problem I'll post it here before bug reporting; Since I upgraded to KDE 4.10.0 from 4.9.5, plasma-desktop begins to lag after some amount of uptime (usually a few hours). All graphical components update slowly and get very laggy (such as menus) and the only way to fix it is killing the plasma-desktop process and starting it up again. While this happens however, neither plasma-desktop or any other process I can see in the System Monitor is using more memory or CPU than normal, making this even weirder. Anyone else have this issue and know where it might be from and how to fix it?
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Manager
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does a new user experience same? or if you reset plasma desktop to defaults?
just to confirm "all graphical components" refers exclusively to panels and widgets? |
Registered Member
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Don't know if it happens with a fresh configuration. Rather hard to test for me since I actively use my desktop and computer and don't wanna mess up the settings either. plasma-desktop also needs to run for hours before the problem takes place, so I can only test it once or twice a day.
I assume something like a plasmoid or bad configuration might be the cause, but I don't know how to tell exactly. Note that I deleted my kde4 cache (/var/tmp/kdecache-mircea) after the upgrade so the problem does not lie there. But what is affected seems to be the panel, launcher, and other desktop menus and components. Kwin desktop effects for example didn't appear to lag. |
Manager
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try running kbuildsycoca4 --noincremental, but run it in krunner or just ignore all the messages
you could try removing the widgets you use least and the ones that weren't installed from a std repo (if there are any) and see if that helps. if it's a bad plasmoid it'll be trial and error discovering which |
Registered Member
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I care a lot about my desktop setup so removing any plasmoids is not an option for me But I ran kbuildsycoca4 and from what I understand it went well (first time I hear about this command). I'll check if the slowdowns still happen after this and mention here if they do. I ran it in a console since I don't mind the verbosity... here is the full output in case it indicates anything useful:
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Administrator
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It may be helpful if you post a list of applets, particularly if they are 3rd party, interact with the network, or take advantage of graphical effects in some manner.
KDE Sysadmin
[img]content/bcooksley_sig.png[/img] |
Registered Member
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I have a screenshot of my desktop. It's older but shows the desktop widgets I currently have (except the LCD Weather which I had to remove because of this): http://i47.tinypic.com/qs0fon.jpg But no third-party ones, only those installed with KDE. |
Administrator
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Can you please define laggy please?
Does it occur temporarily for a few moments every so often, or is it constant?
KDE Sysadmin
[img]content/bcooksley_sig.png[/img] |
Registered Member
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By laggy I mean that the menus are slow to update, and all desktop effects or transition effects work at a very slow frame rate. Similar to how programs behave when something is using 100% CPU, although I checked and it's not the case here. Once the issue starts happening, it seems to be permanent until I restart plasma-desktop. Though there are moments when it lags more or less. |
Registered Member
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I noticed that the issue still happens this morning after waking up. I saw another detail about it however: The lag only happens while the panel is being shown. I have my panel on auto-hide, so it only pops up when I position the mouse pointer at the bottom of the screen. While the panel is dragged out and visible, everything is very slow and laggy... but once it's hidden other parts of the desktop (like the right-click menu and plasmoids) work normal again.
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Administrator
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Unusual. This indicates that it may involve KWin or the graphics system.
Which applets do you have on the panel? Does forcing it to always be visible (and then restarting Plasma Desktop) avoid the issue?
KDE Sysadmin
[img]content/bcooksley_sig.png[/img] |
Registered Member
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Not many. This older desktop screenshot shows the stuff on my panel. I'll see if I can turn it to Always Visible temporarily and if that avoids the issue. |
Registered Member
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Although I'm not 100% sure, I believe I found out what's been causing this. I do not have enough accuracy and information to post it on the bug tracker yet, so I'm writing it here for people to analyze better.
Although I never gave attention to this problem, the Notifications icon in system tray permanently had the spinning circle onto it since I upgraded to 4.10.0 (as if it was constantly busy). The plasma-desktop process was also constantly using 4% CPU when doing nothing, which seemed a little odd but I didn't relate it to this problem or give it attention. Then the lag I reported here, which only happens when the panel is visible and therefore the Notifications icon. Last night I was bored and playing around with my system settings. I decided to enter the Notifications properties and enable "file transfers and other jobs". I previously had this off cuz I found it hard to watch the copy progress of files in notifications, and preferred an own window. Once I did that and clicked OK, the spinning circle disappeared from the icon for the first time in weeks. Earlier I opened KSysGuard and noticed that plasma-desktop is now down to using 1% CPU when idle (normal since I have a bunch of plasmoids). I'm going to see if this fixes the lag too, which it probably will from how things feel. If so, there might be a problem in KDE 4.10.0 with NOT enabling "file transfers and other jobs" for your notifications icon. Maybe it only happens after having upgraded from 4.9.5... who knows. But it might be safe for someone with 4.10.0 to disable this option, restart the system, and see if Notifications are behaving a bit off after a while. If there are clear elements to identify a bug I can report this on the BT too. |
Administrator
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The continuous animation could very well be the cause of the lag, and definitely the cause of the CPU usage.
The spin usually indicates a task in progress - so you have very possibly uncovered a bug. Could you try re-disabling the file transfer and jobs information display, and see if the bug occurs again?
KDE Sysadmin
[img]content/bcooksley_sig.png[/img] |
Registered Member
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Well it doesn't seem to any more. Perhaps the problem was upgrading from 4.9.5 to 4.10.0 while "file transfers and other jobs" was off. And re-enabling it even for a moment caused the bug to go away and whatever was stuck to get unstuck. Not such a major problem in that case if it's not a permanent bug. |
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