I have run into some troubles on my machine, which used to work until a few days ago. Recently, KDE Plasma 5 has been taking very long to start up, and even when it does, it is very unresponsive (auto-hidden panels take 3 seconds to show, right clicks are rarely responded to anywhere on the Plasma shell).
Running ksysguard, I have noticed that kbuildsycoca5 keeps re-spawning new processes; apparently several each second, every time an older process dies or terminates. Of course, I cannot kill them (or rather, I can, but that doesn’t help; a new kbuildsycoca5 process shows up immediately). They seem to be child processes to plasmashell, and this behavior is most definitely the problem: When I moved /usr/bin/kbuildsycoca5 somewhere else, the problem went away. When I run kbuildsycoca5 manually, it seems to terminate normally; this is what it says:
kbuildsycoca5 running...
Reusing existing ksycoca
Recreating ksycoca file ("/home/backflip/.cache/ksycoca5", version 303)
Still in the time dict (i.e. deleted files) ("apps")
Saving
Emitting notifyDatabaseChanged ("apps")
Unfortunately, kservice 5.14.2 which was supposed to fix that bug caused exactly the same problem on other systems where 5.14.0/1 worked fine.
Meanwhile 5.14.3 has been released which should fix that too.
It’s also in the KDE:Frameworks5 repo already, but it still takes a bit of time until the repo is rebuilt and published.
I use the regular KDE Frameworks 5 repository and it currently only gives me 5.14.1, and the system seems to slow down significantly, probably due to the problem with kbuildsycoca5.
How can I fix this, should I use the factory repository (I worry that this might introduce other problems, but maybe I am wrong). Or should I try and build kservice myself?
Makes me wonder whether I should keep the factory repository and do the other updates too, or rather fall back to the stable frameworks 5 repository. Any suggestions about possible risks with one or the other?
I used sometimes Factory and Thumbleweed repos with my 13.2, too. And I never had problems in this cases. But I disabled the regular repos when I did this.
Do you mean the main Factory repo (which still has kservice 5.13), or KDE:Frameworks5 for Factory (which might have been rebuilt/published faster)?
The first one would be a bad idea in general to add to your system, the second one might work but can also give you dependency problems (also it is still built against Qt 5.4.2, while you probably have Qt 5.5.0 installed, could break everything, especially if you install libKF5Style5 from there… ;)).
Makes me wonder whether I should keep the factory repository and do the other updates too, or rather fall back to the stable frameworks 5 repository. Any suggestions about possible risks with one or the other?
You should remove the Factory repo immediately and fully switch back to the correct ones for your openSUSE version.
The update to 5.14.3 is published meanwhile anyway, and I can confirm it fixes the issue here on my 13.2 system.