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    desktop slow to appear after login with SDDM

    Hi -- just upgraded to 15.04 from 14.10. Been painful, but i've tamed most of the issues, and this last thing is proving challenging; if anyone feels like slogging through this with me i would be much obliged! Been banging my head on it all day and am just about at wits' end.

    sddm takes a long time for me to log in; meaning, the time from hitting "enter" on the password to when the desktop appears. What used to be a 1-second-or-so operation now takes 15-20 seconds. Tried to google a solution, came up empty. (I thought to try lightdm. Had a ton of trouble getting it to work; long story, gave up on that for now. Seems like it's not being actively developed/fixed.)

    I have a script that does a ps every 0.5 seconds and does a diff between the result and the previous ps, so I can watch what processes are starting and stopping. (The processes are logged in between timestamps every 0.5 seconds. It's possible that processes start and exit in less than 0.5 seconds and within a single window, and thus don't appear in the log file.)

    There is a clear section of about 17 seconds where nothing is starting or stopping. I was hoping that the processes that start just before this period, or end just after, might offer some clues, but nothing clear. The most common thing is a krunner process/thread starts, then 17 seconds go by, then another krunner process/thread, then plasmashell, then a few seconds, then things progress normally. But i'm not sure if those processes really deserve the blame.

    E.g. backlighthelper was running, 10 seconds would go by, then it would exit. I disabled it, and then kdeconnectd appeared to be the cause. Uninstalled KDE Connect, and now this, etc. I wonder if the pause is unrelated to the particular processes, and maybe something to do with a video driver or whatever. During the long period, the screens change once or twice (background image shifts, etc., almost like mode setting is going on.) I have multiple monitors going, incidentally.

    I also note that if I switch to vterms while the login is happening, it seems to "pause" it; as if sddm (or whatever is controlling the process) has to wait for me to go back to the graphical vterm to continue it's work and/or waiting.

    Anyway, that's what I have so far. Gonna try renaming .kde. If anyone has heard of this or has tips on what to check next, I'd be much obliged. I'd also be happy to try a different display manager, if there is one that works and doesn't require installing an entire desktop with it. :-)

    Thanks!
    -c

    #2
    Update: removed .kde and .config and there was no change in the issue... any ideas appreciated.
    Last edited by chconnor; Sep 02, 2015, 01:17 PM.

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      #3
      I dunno. One of the things that slightly bugs me about KDE over the years is how slow it is to get to the desktop after logging in. It has always been slow to me, even going back to KDE 3. Even with an ssd and 4gb ram, I have never seen a kde desktop load in a second or 2.

      The ,real change that may be the move to systemd. perhaps? Maybe it needs some tweaking?

      As you upgraded, you may have a grub option to boot using upstart, I think that was available in 15.04. Might see if there is a difference there. Upgrading to the later plasma/frameworks/etc via the kubunut-backports may help, too.

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        #4
        Any difference with no display manager?

        systemd-analyze blame offer any insights?

        Just guessing here. When this used to happen, I never did find a cause.

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          #5
          Thanks! -- tried an upstart startup; no change.

          systemd-analyze blame | head -n 10 shows:

          6.419s ifup-wait-all-auto.service
          2.035s sendmail.service
          1.639s bups1.mount
          1.499s proj3.mount
          1.341s systemd-udev-settle.service
          1.204s proj2.mount
          1.130s apache2.service
          1.013s mysql.service
          734ms aud2.mount
          454ms proj1.mount
          ...from memory, i don't think ifup-wait-all-auto.service is always a the top of the list and so large, so that may just be a fluke.

          Besides the process watching script I described above, I also started a dstat and htop log going in the background while logging in; the idle period really seems idle. I.e., nothing is using CPU/disk/ram/etc.

          Seems like this isn't a startup/systemd issue? E.g. if I log out and log back in, the same thing happens. Instinct is pointing to sddm, but apparently I'm not savvy enough to replace it with something... (failed at lightdm, as mentioned above).

          ronw, you suggested trying with no display manager: I love that idea, and have no emotional attachment to a graphical login screen, but googling yields a lot of conflicting/complicated methods. Should I just comment out the line in /etc/X11/default-display-manager? Should I edit or remove /etc/init.d/sddm? Uninstall all display managers? What happens at login in that case -- do I need to start the KDE/plasma session manually or does it happen after a text-based login or something? Or should I install NoDM? Etc.

          Thanks for any guidance!
          -c

          Comment


            #6
            Originally posted by chconnor View Post
            ronw, you suggested trying with no display manager: I love that idea, and have no emotional attachment to a graphical login screen, but googling yields a lot of conflicting/complicated methods. Should I just comment out the line in /etc/X11/default-display-manager? Should I edit or remove /etc/init.d/sddm? Uninstall all display managers? What happens at login in that case -- do I need to start the KDE/plasma session manually or does it happen after a text-based login or something? Or should I install NoDM? Etc.

            Thanks for any guidance!
            -c
            I just uninstall SDDM.

            You could probably also just disable the service, but can't say I've tried that:

            Code:
            $ systemctl disable display-manager.service
            That will leave you at a bare login prompt. Login and either startx (if you have an .xinitrc file) or startkde.

            And if that doesn't help, either re-install or enable the service.

            Comment


              #7
              I think I get this, in that it's a long time for the desktop to start after login. (After the drama to actually get the desktop, my attitude was "I'll settle for this"). Sometimes the desktop half-starts, in that some elements are displayed, but not all, for several seconds.

              I suspect kwin (called kwin_x11 now), but only because it was the culprit which stopped me getting to the desktop at all, it would go 100% CPU either indefinitely or for a long time and fail. A problem with my old onboard video chip.
              Regards, John Little

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