The desktop is slow and sometimes laggy

[orestis]

Hello, I have KDE for about a week now and I can see that sometimes is slow and laggy, for example dolphin needs 5-10 seconds to open or when I press Alt+F2 it might lag a bit. Those are not big problems but considered to my hardware(i3, 4gb ram) I dont think that it make sense. Is it a problem? I had the same problems with Ubuntu Unity.

[anika200]

Hello orestis,
it is hard to say what could be the problem with so few clues.

Here is what I would check:
Go to Desktop Effects in system settings and turn off the following setting under the General > Activation > Enable desktop effects at startup.

You have to logout and then back in to get the settings changed.

Does it help?

[GreyGeek]

I suspect that your problem is related to indexing of files. Check System Settings --> Desktop Search --> Status tab and disable and/or suspend desktop indexing. Also, the indexer may be indexing your entire system from "/" on down. On Desktop Search is a customization tab which will allow you to restrict which folders indexing will take place in. I have mine limited to my home account, /home/jerry.

Others disable Desktop Search altogether, relying on "locate" and "updatedb" instead. You can install it with
sudo apt-get install mlocate
Then, in a console, you can issue sudo updatedb which will create the database and install cron files that will automatically update the locate db on a regular basis. Then, when you want to find something you can use locate something, or use regular expressions to restrict the search. Use man locate for specific information on how to use locate and updatedb.

[anika200]

I
Others disable Desktop Search altogether, relying on "locate" and "updatedb" instead.

Is there still problems with this since the switch to baloo?

[claydoh]

Outside of a possible graphics problem, one overlooked place for random slowness is the system using the swap too early and aggressively. If the hard drive is a slower spinning one, or one with some age, this can bring it to a crawl for periods of time, even with 4 gb of ram. This can be compounded on fresh installs with the indexer doing its initial stuff.

Look at ksysguard and look at the Load tab to see if a lot of swap is being used when this happens.
if this is the case, I would suggest trying this:
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Sw...I_change_it.3F
Substitute the command kdesudo kate for the gksudo gedit part, and you can try other figures such as 40, 30, or 20 in place of 10 if you want to ease into it. The beauty is that the commandline part is temporary so you can try it out to see if it does help.

There is some background on the topic
http://askubuntu.com/questions/18421...iness-to-10-20
I blame browser tabs and hard drive caches when it happens to me, even with 4gb ram and an ssd (a cheapie) on my old dual core laptop, it will slow down a LOT when it hits the swap early.

[orestis]

Hello orestis,
it is hard to say what could be the problem with so few clues.

Here is what I would check:
Go to Desktop Effects in system settings and turn off the following setting under the General > Activation > Enable desktop effects at startup.

You have to logout and then back in to get the settings changed.

Does it help?

I already chose optimized effects

I suspect that your problem is related to indexing of files. Check System Settings --> Desktop Search --> Status tab and disable and/or suspend desktop indexing. Also, the indexer may be indexing your entire system from "/" on down. On Desktop Search is a customization tab which will allow you to restrict which folders indexing will take place in. I have mine limited to my home account, /home/jerry.

Others disable Desktop Search altogether, relying on "locate" and "updatedb" instead. You can install it with
sudo apt-get install mlocate
Then, in a console, you can issue sudo updatedb which will create the database and install cron files that will automatically update the locate db on a regular basis. Then, when you want to find something you can use locate something, or use regular expressions to restrict the search. Use man locate for specific information on how to use locate and updatedb.

I was a bit confused. So the desktop search is just gonna help only for the search or the overall responsiveness of my system?

Outside of a possible graphics problem, one overlooked place for random slowness is the system using the swap too early and aggressively. If the hard drive is a slower spinning one, or one with some age, this can bring it to a crawl for periods of time, even with 4 gb of ram. This can be compounded on fresh installs with the indexer doing its initial stuff.

Look at ksysguard and look at the Load tab to see if a lot of swap is being used when this happens.
if this is the case, I would suggest trying this:
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Sw...I_change_it.3F
Substitute the command kdesudo kate for the gksudo gedit part, and you can try other figures such as 40, 30, or 20 in place of 10 if you want to ease into it. The beauty is that the commandline part is temporary so you can try it out to see if it does help.

There is some background on the topic
http://askubuntu.com/questions/18421...iness-to-10-20
I blame browser tabs and hard drive caches when it happens to me, even with 4gb ram and an ssd (a cheapie) on my old dual core laptop, it will slow down a LOT when it hits the swap early.

No my Swap is almost zero, how do I check my hard drive is slow?

[anika200]

I already chose optimized effects

Ok but this still does not tell me anything and you did not try my suggestion so how do you know it is not the desktop effects? If you have tried disabling them and it is still slow then it may be something else.

[claydoh]

No my Swap is almost zero, how do I check my hard drive is slow?

Then you are fine, unless you see heavy swap usage when you are seeing the slowdowns.

[GreyGeek]

Next time your desktop appears sluggish use Ctrl+Esc and on the process list that pops up click on the CPU% column to sort it so that the highest percentages are at the top. You'll see what's taking all your cpu cycles.

[orestis]

Ah ok thank you. Next time I will check the monitor then. In case everything freezes is there any way to find the log and check the reason?

[GreyGeek]

A slow down, or freeze, doesn't always trigger a log entry if the OS doesn't see any errors. Waiting on an interrupt or for polling to finish isn't an error, even though it may slow down or freeze your laptop. Ergo, looking at the process list to see which is hogging the cpu cycles, or, eating up the RAM.

[orestis]

OK thank you