Dolphin incredibly slow on LEAP 42.2

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#1

I just installed LEAP 42.2 on a new machine (dual Xeon E5 2640v4, 128GiB RAM, nvidia Quadro k620).
Root partition is on an SSD, with BTRFS (snapshots on), and the user data on a RAID 5 (3 disks, XFS)

Initially, everything was incredibly slow, even resizing windows. I could open konsole, but other windows refused giving display errors. Some reboots later, that went away (not actually sure why, I only attempted and failed to install the nvidia drivers), and now, with the nvidia drivers, most things are reasonably fast, except for dolphin, and some KDE configuration dialogues:

  • Dolphin takes a little over 5 seconds to launch, half of the time I see an empty window frame
  • Whenever I change anything on the appearance (background image, desktop theme, icon set or size…), the respective dialogue freezes for a few seconds before the change is applied.

I looked at a few threads here, and tried removing akonadi (including Kontact, Kmail and all that), with no effect. Also removed baloo as far as possible without removing Plasma, to no avail.

One potential culprit I have spotted are the two processes “md0_resync” and “md0_raid5” which seem to oscillate between 1% CPU load and “disk sleep”, but seem to use zero memory and no disk IO. Dolphin also seems to spend quite some time in “disk sleep” while launching. File transfers from another computer was quite fast. I moved ~7GiB data into my home on the RAID via network, in short time (did not measure, unfortunately)

…any ideas?

#2

Update:

Just ran “mdadm --detail /dev/md0” and found that the RAID is actually rebuilding and operating in degraded mode – that may well be the reason right there … Apologies for asking prematurely! I’ll update again if the problem is still there tomorrow.

#3

Yep, just as suspected… the syncing finished over night, and now it’s all fine.

I suppose this means that LEAP will not (as I had assumed) finish setting up the RAID array during the installation but keep doing that as a background job. I had actually let the installation run overnight and expected the setup to be complete after that.

Apologies again for misidentifying the problem.

(Also, because I have to mention this: I am such a happy user after noticing the changes in the launch menu from KDE 4 to 5! This is exactly what I’ve always wanted since KDE 4 introduced search but removed the quickly browse-able menu.)