kde desktop suddenly acting really slow but programs run at normal speed

Thursday, 20 October 2011

Running KDE 4.6.x on Fedora 15. All of a sudden everything having to do with
the desktop is super slow. The plasmoids keep freezing up. clicking on the
launcher takes forever for something to actually appear. If I reboot, KDE
desktop is just black for a while. But it's not my computer locking up
because any programs I have running aren't slow.

Nothing's really using up a lot of CPU. I only have two guesses.

1) somethings's up with my 3D graphics drivers - although I haven't done any
package updates relating to the kernel or nvidia drivers

I know glxgears isn't the best, most accurate way to test, but I get

 Code:

18143 frames in 5.0 seconds = 3628.446 FPS
20105 frames in 5.0 seconds = 4020.875 FPS

glxinfo yields:

 Code:

name of display: :0
display: :0  screen: 0
direct rendering: Yes
server glx vendor string: NVIDIA Corporation
server glx version string: 1.4
server glx extensions:
    GLX_EXT_visual_info, GLX_EXT_visual_rating, GLX_SGIX_fbconfig,
    GLX_SGIX_pbuffer, GLX_SGI_video_sync, GLX_SGI_swap_control,
    GLX_EXT_swap_control, GLX_EXT_texture_from_pixmap, GLX_ARB_create_context,
    GLX_ARB_create_context_profile, GLX_EXT_create_context_es2_profile,
    GLX_ARB_create_context_robustness, GLX_ARB_multisample,
    GLX_NV_float_buffer, GLX_ARB_fbconfig_float, GLX_EXT_framebuffer_sRGB
client glx vendor string: NVIDIA Corporation
client glx version string: 1.4
client glx extensions:
    GLX_ARB_get_proc_address, GLX_ARB_multisample, GLX_EXT_visual_info,
    GLX_EXT_visual_rating, GLX_EXT_import_context, GLX_SGI_video_sync,
    GLX_NV_swap_group, GLX_NV_video_out, GLX_SGIX_fbconfig, GLX_SGIX_pbuffer,
    GLX_SGI_swap_control, GLX_EXT_swap_control, GLX_ARB_create_context,
    GLX_ARB_create_context_profile, GLX_NV_float_buffer,
    GLX_ARB_fbconfig_float, GLX_EXT_fbconfig_packed_float,
    GLX_EXT_texture_from_pixmap, GLX_EXT_framebuffer_sRGB,
    GLX_NV_present_video, GLX_NV_copy_image, GLX_NV_multisample_coverage,
    GLX_NV_video_capture, GLX_EXT_create_context_es2_profile,
    GLX_ARB_create_context_robustness
GLX version: 1.4
GLX extensions:
    GLX_EXT_visual_info, GLX_EXT_visual_rating, GLX_SGIX_fbconfig,
    GLX_SGIX_pbuffer, GLX_SGI_video_sync, GLX_SGI_swap_control,
    GLX_EXT_swap_control, GLX_EXT_texture_from_pixmap, GLX_ARB_create_context,
    GLX_ARB_create_context_profile, GLX_EXT_create_context_es2_profile,
    GLX_ARB_create_context_robustness, GLX_ARB_multisample,
    GLX_NV_float_buffer, GLX_ARB_fbconfig_float, GLX_EXT_framebuffer_sRGB,
    GLX_ARB_get_proc_address
OpenGL vendor string: NVIDIA Corporation
OpenGL renderer string: GeForce 9500 GT/PCI/SSE2
OpenGL version string: 3.3.0 NVIDIA 280.13
OpenGL shading language version string: 3.30 NVIDIA via Cg compiler

it goes on and on, but I figured that was all that was important.

Disabling desktop effects did not fix the situation. Not sure if that rules
out graphics driver issues.

Not sure if this proves that things are OK with the graphics or not, but
Gnome 3 seems to run just fine. No slowness. Xfce seems to work just fine
even with compositing turned on. The only issue appears to be with KDE

2) I did update some small amount of packages fftw or something and a couple
others - seemed like no big deal.

here's what I updated today:

Oct 20 18:54:26 Updated: imsettings-libs-1.2.5-3.fc15.x86_64
Oct 20 18:54:27 Updated: imsettings-gnome-1.2.5-3.fc15.x86_64
Oct 20 18:54:29 Updated: imsettings-1.2.5-3.fc15.x86_64
Oct 20 18:54:30 Updated: imsettings-xfce-1.2.5-3.fc15.x86_64
Oct 20 18:54:31 Updated: fftw-libs-3.3-3.fc15.x86_64
Oct 20 18:54:32 Updated: ibus-rawcode-1.3.1.20100707-5.fc15.x86_64
Oct 20 18:54:46 Updated: 1:java-1.6.0-openjdk-1.6.0.0-60.1.10.4.fc15.x86_64
Oct 20 18:54:49 Updated: perl-DateTime-TimeZone-1.40-1.fc15.noarch

I feel like KDE is getting stuck on something perhaps - waiting for
something to happen that's not happening. Or maybe something SELinux
related? If it helps with the debugging - I have the last.fm plasmoid. It
has a counter on it until the next update and I'll notice that it'll get
stuck on a number for a while and then start counting again before gettting
stuck again

--
Eric Mesa
http://www.ericsbinaryworld.com