KDE4 has worse graphical performance than KDE3, that is know.
It is because bad drivers…
But what I’m experiencing is general bad responsiveness (a lot disk activity, like if swapping is going on). After some usage everything slows down to a crawl!
I checked free output, but swap is untouched:
free -m
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 1519 1487 31 0 3 1108
-/+ buffers/cache: 375 1144
Swap: 1027 0 1027
My machine is:
Athlon 64 2800+
1.5 GB ram
~500GB of disks
Nvidia 7600GT or Radeon 9250
For e.g. opening dolphin → disk activity raises a lot
opening ktorrent → disk activity, opening opera → disk activity.
Cold starts are long, but warm are nothing shorter. Under KDE3 there isn’t that much disk activity. What could be the reason in first place for that?
Opening a movie from ktorrent → it needs seconds before it starts to play!
And even worse, closing mplayer will lead to a black screen and disk activity will raise again (really seems like it is swapping, but free shows nothing).
In KDE3 movie opens in under a second, without disk trashing around that much and closing it it’s like nothing ever happened, desktop is super responsive.
What could be the problem of that?
I like a lot KDE4 but this makes me really think about using it ever again.
KDE4 was installed from Factory repo (4.2 RC).
I also retested everything with a radeon, just to be sure nvidia drivers aren’t interfering.
UPDATE: It was ktorrent, lowering speed helped.
However in kde4 always when moving larger files starts to show above simptoms, meanwile kde3 is unaffected.
It is a bug somewhere in kde4.
I’m also using kde 4.2rc1 from factory and do not experience said problems. You may want to make sure that KDE4 Desktop Search and Akonadi are disabled, other than that I don’t know what’s going on with your system. The only irritating problem I experience here is with the grouping of icons in the taskbar where they change the black background color, see pic below
http://img441.imageshack.us/img441/7576/dbx26ea1.png
other than that, kde 4.2rc1 is pretty snappy here
Updating status:
after using kde3 for a day, I can say it’s the same.
KDE3 is graphically more responsive than kde4, so this contributed to my early judgements about this happening only on kde4.
So, it’s a system issue.
Is this vmstat output ok:
procs -----------memory---------- ---swap-- -----io---- -system-- ----cpu----
r b swpd free buff cache si so bi bo in cs us sy id wa
1 2 3296 33232 1564 1164348 0 0 13396 57384 730 531 7 15 0 78
0 2 3296 32860 1564 1165508 0 0 54024 12336 980 764 9 28 0 63
1 2 3296 33976 1556 1165152 0 0 56796 0 1037 1041 6 29 0 65
0 1 3296 33604 1572 1165560 0 0 47772 24744 1038 1252 9 28 0 63
3 1 3296 33496 1588 1166068 0 0 44372 44848 1151 1882 17 27 0 56
1 1 3296 34612 1596 1164608 0 0 37200 32768 865 843 8 22 0 70
0 2 3296 33000 1604 1166540 0 0 41112 40960 880 767 7 26 0 67
1 1 3296 32752 1596 1166372 0 0 47752 46392 994 708 9 27 0 64
1 1 3296 33792 1588 1165392 0 0 45576 45344 1034 803 9 28 0 63
0 2 3296 33048 1696 1164724 0 0 11160 72104 779 520 10 12 0 78
2 3 3296 34396 1740 1162768 0 0 7264 55776 1012 1476 10 13 0 77
0 2 3296 32908 1752 1165360 0 0 35608 11792 1041 1499 7 21 0 72
When copying 6GB file from /home to /multiMedia (2 different disks), even mouse movement became sluggish.