Desktop animations, video and audio chopped (solved by itself... Eh?)

[Lord P]

Hi everyone.
After upgrading to kubuntu feisty, I noticed that kde animations (such as the bouncing icon while loading a program, or the popups in the main bar) are much slower than normal, and when I tried to play any video or music file, it went much slowly, seeming "interrupted" every half second or so. I also tried doing a clean install, clearing the root and home folder, but the problem persists.
It seems somone else had the same problem, but still I did not find a working way to repair this problem.
Where should I begin to look for the error?
(P.S.: I already posted the same question in the general Ubuntu forums, before realizing that this should be the proper place...)

[jankushka]

Re: Desktop animations, video and audio chopped

simple things first:
how much ram do you have?
how much swap do you have?
is your swap loaded all right?
you can check that with the "free" command

then...
your system stammering like that points to something taking keeping the cpu busy.
in my case, it was the microcode of the Intel Pro Wireless 3945.
it kept crashing and the system would reload it every time (something like 5 times a sec).

it's a matter of finding out what it is...
a) hit ctrl-alt-f1 (ctrl-alt-f7 to go back to your graphical session) and see if any message pop up on the console. if nothing's there, then
b) you may want to start the system's performance monitor and look for anything using a lot of cpu (user% and system% colums) and
c) you could also use the system's logs viewer to check the system and kernel logs and see the messages that pop up there

hopefully we can find some hint of what's going on...

hth
cheers

[Lord P]

Re: Desktop animations, video and audio chopped

In the order:
More than 500 MB of RAM and 1 GB of swap, both working and not full.
The CPU does not seem to be under stress, neither generally or during animations or audio playback.
In the logs there seems to be nothing relevant, but maybe it has escaped me...
Also, I noted two things: when keeping pressed a keyboard button, it writes slower than the usual, so I believe this is connected too; and videos on youtube work flawlessly.
I'm starting to believe it's a problem with kde... Maybe some timeout?
Thanks for the help!

[Lord P]

Re: Desktop animations, video and audio chopped

Ok, Now I am puzzled: after installing macromedia flash (I suppose... It was the only change I made yesterday) the system is working completely, no more choppings or slow animations.
Voodoo informatics?