Serious problem with Kate (texteditor)

Hello all,

For many years I rely on the Kate text editor for programming, at work and at home.
Some time ago I installed openSUSE 13.1 at home (at work I’m still using 12.3 fortunately) and since then, I experienced strange phenomena’s with Kate.

During typing/editing Kate freezes regularly. The time that it freezes is usulally very short, about one second, and then it continues normally.
This means that when you type, the characters don’t appear on the screen till the freeze is over. Also, during the freeeze, the mousecursor is not visible.

Recently, the duration of a freeze became much longer, up to more than 5 seconds. It’s super annoying. Kate does not crash, it does not corrupt my documents, it does not loose the typed characters during a freeze. It’s only the Kate window that freezes temporarily.

Now I discovered something more strange. Normally the duration of a freeze is usually about a second or less.
When I start KTorrent and it’s downloading a torrent, the duration of the freeze’s increase a lot.
When I switch-off KTorrent, the freezes are still their but much, much shorter.
Output of TOP:
Tasks: 167 total, 2 running, 165 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie
%Cpu(s): 0.8 us, 0.4 sy, 0.0 ni, 98.5 id, 0.2 wa, 0.0 hi, 0.1 si, 0.0 st
KiB Mem: 8274996 total, 2345748 used, 5929248 free, 121252 buffers
KiB Swap: 0 total, 0 used, 0 free, 1876084 cached

PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
2495 novara 20 0 231016 90704 58284 S 5.639 1.096 1:56.46 ktorrent

Btw, the pc has a 6-core AMD cpu.

As far as I noticed, it’s only Kate that shows this behaviour. Other applications run nice and smooth at the same time.

With openSUSE 12.3 and before, I never had this problem.

Any ideas, suggestions?

On 2014-09-28 09:46, Teuniz wrote:

> As far as I noticed, it’s only Kate that shows this behaviour. Other
> applications run nice and smooth at the same time.
>
> With openSUSE 12.3 and before, I never had this problem.
>
> Any ideas, suggestions?
>
>

Curious…

I use neither program, so I have not seen this.

I do see freezes inside Thunderbird, caused by itself. Symptoms similar
to yours. It happens periodically, the instant that Thunderbird is
checking for nntp posts on my local leafnode server. I suspect that
Thunderbird is not threaded, or not a completely (the composer vs the
fetcher).

During these freezes, it is also incapable of redrawing Th when I
alt-tab to/from another application.


Cheers / Saludos,

Carlos E. R.
(from 13.1 x86_64 “Bottle” at Telcontar)

I have the same problem with Kate… :frowning:

Launch kate from a terminal window, keep it open and observe any messages during the freezes in the said terminal?

On 2014-09-28 15:26, Teuniz wrote:
>
> robin_listas;2666892 Wrote:
>>
>> During these freezes, it is also incapable of redrawing Th when I
>> alt-tab to/from another application.
>>
>
> I have the same problem with Kate… :frowning:

Not exactly the same. Same behaviour when it kicks in, yes.

Yours is triggered by KTorrent, apparently, making Kate very sluggish.

Mine is caused by Thunderbird to Thunderbird, ie, same app.

Both KTorrent and Kate are KDE apps. Thunderbird is independent, with
gtk binds, I think.


Cheers / Saludos,

Carlos E. R.
(from 13.1 x86_64 “Bottle” at Telcontar)

I have also experienced random, short term (1 sec or less) ‘freezes’ or ‘stalls’ since moving to KDE 4.14.x on my 13.1 desktop, with several apps.
Never long enough to trace with top or KSysguard.

Now that we are at KDE 4.14.1, it seems better(less frequent).

Thunderbird - seems Tbird now does automatic folder compaction by default, after some period of time/activity.
The compaction does contribute a ‘stall’ occasionally, but keeps the directory more orderly, I suspect.

I just discovered that it’s not related to KTorrent in particular.
Today the problem occurred heavily while KTorrent was not running. Instead my mediaplayer (Audacious) was running.
After quitting Audacious, the problem continued for some time and then started to become less heavy.

What I find very interesting is that on my pc, with every texteditor (except Kate), when I keep a key pressed, I see a continuously growing line of characters.
With Kate, it’s not continuously, every now and then it stops for a short time.

On 2014-09-28 17:16, cmcgrath5035 wrote:

> Thunderbird - seems Tbird now does automatic folder compaction by
> default, after some period of time/activity.
> The compaction does contribute a ‘stall’ occasionally, but keeps the
> directory more orderly, I suspect.

Yes. Anytime Thunderbird does something in background which does not end
instantly, Thunderbird becomes unresponsive. So yes, compaction, or
fetching nttp from a very fast server. While it does that, it can not do
anything else, like typing.


Cheers / Saludos,

Carlos E. R.
(from 13.1 x86_64 “Bottle” at Telcontar)

Don’t see a problem here repeating values are smooth no pauses

For what it is worth I’m running a 6 Core AMD With 8 gig

Could be a background process causing the problem I guess

When I was running my old single core AMD there were pauses in a lot of apps LOL

But why is it only affecting Kate?

Have no idea. It was just a guess. As I said I can’t see a problem here. So it is either your hardware or software that makes the difference or combination. Check you memory usage. Watch top as you reproduce the problem see if something pops to the top when the pause happens.

Do you run a email program all the time? Anything else?