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KDE4 on Squeeze - Slow for everyone or just me?

Asked by [ Editor ] , Edited by vrkalak [ Moderator ]

After installing Squeeze a few months ago, I’ve noticed that logging into KDE4 is unbelievably slow.


After the KDE session is running, the desktop is very responsive, and there aren’t any noticeable performance issues. However, the login process seems to take forever.

– First KDE login (after system boot) : 25-30" 
– Following logins (after the first one): 15-20"

Those times are counted from the moment that I press ENTER on the kdm login window to the moment the desktop is responsive. For this simple test, by responsive I mean being able to display the K menu when clicking on the K button. For the timings I’ve logged in with a user that doesn’t have any widgets on the desktop, no auto starting applications, not even a wallpaper — just a plain KDE session.

Somehow I find it hard to accept that starting a graphical session takes longer than loading and initializing the operating system. And that’s why I’d like to know if this is happening just to me, or if other users have noticed the same.

Could this be a system performance bottleneck? I’m using a system with an Intel i5 450 processor (2.4 GHz) and 4 GB RAM. I know this isn’t “state-of-the-art” hardware, but it doesn’t seem to lack processing power either.
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3 answers

3

pehjota [ Editor ]

Those times sound about right, unfortunately. But a student in Summer of KDE (an overflow program for those who couldn’t get into Google Summer of Code) 2010 worked on this and got the startup time down from 30 seconds to 19 seconds. For more information, see the KDE.news article on SoK 2010 and read about Yuvraj Tomar’s project. I don’t know how he achieved that or whether his work made it into KDE SC 4.6, but you could probably find that out by looking for his commits in the KDE version control repositories for KWin and KDM.

So other than trying the newly released KDE SC 4.6 (or waiting for it make it to the “Qt/KDE semi-official package repository”), I don’t know how to speed up KDE startup.

NN comments
alex
-

Hi, I just wanted to thank you for your answer, which was really helpful. I’ve applied some tweaks that I found in different forums, but all the improvements are negligible. Somehow is discouraging to learn that Debian users who prefer KDE will have to endure this throughout the Squeeze life cycle. Unfortunately the KDE release included in Squeeze has broken pieces and quite bad performance (specially with regard to startup and shutdown). However I understand that the problem is at the upstream level. It looks like after 3 years in development, the KDE folks haven’t got their act together yet. Perhaps this would be a good time to start looking for better performing desktop environments.

pehjota
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Well you could track Debian Testing, which is really quite stable and will probably see an upgrade to KDE SC 4.5 soon after Squeeze’s release (especially since it’s already “semi-officially” packaged) with 4.6 likely to follow eventually as well.

From what I’ve heard, performance (specifically memory usage, but I suspect also speed) is much better in KDE SC 4.6 than it has been in previous releases. I haven’t tried it for myself yet, but it sounds to me like with 4.6, KDE SC 4.x is maturing (and slimming down) nicely.

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0

Anonymous

Hi all,

Could you please provide that script? I have the same problem but kwallet seems not to be the issue.

Thanks.

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henning.spruth
-

Below is the script – save it to a file named capture_xsession, make it executable, then log in on a console and run the “tail -f …” command pipeline shown in the script.

Then switch to the X-Windows tty and log in. The file /tmp/out.log will contain the various messages prefixed with the time in ms since you started the pipeline.

Henning

!/usr/bin/tclsh8.5

#

Script to capture and timestamp .xsession-errors. Run as:

#

tail -f .xsession-errors | capture_xsession | tee /tmp/out.log

#

set t [clock milliseconds] while {1} {

set line [gets stdin]
set t1 [expr [clock milliseconds]-$t]
puts "$t1: $line"

}

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0

henning

I think I’m seeing the same problem: while the desktop itself comes up reasonably quickly, it is not responsive, i.e. clicking on the K menu doesn’t do anything. It takes about 25s for the startup sound to play.

Trying to debug this, I wrote a script to monitor .xsession-errors and prefix each line with a timestamp. From that I found that there is a 20s delay starting kwalletd. After temporarily removing  /usr/lib/kde4/libkdeinit/libkdeinit4_kwalletd.so, the startup delay is now less than 5s!

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henning.spruth
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Also, it seems that disabling the wallet manager in its settings menu has the same effect.

adam.trickett
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That is interesting, the question is how can we use it to our advantage, assuming you are running KDE4 and want to use the kwalletd tool, which I do.

henning.spruth
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I just tried removing the knm-runtime package (which I don’t need since this is a desktop and everything is configured in /etc/network/interfaces), and that seems to have fixed the problem.

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