[Solved] KDE 4.4 Performance Issues

jlacroix · 2010-05-09 21:06:03

I'm someone that has heard about people having performance issues with KDE 4.x but have never had it happen to me, until now. KDE 4.x has performed very well for me on all of my machines, but ever since I got my Dell Latitude D630 from eBay recently, I've finally seen some slow performance. Here are the specs of my machines for comparison:

Latitude D630 Laptop:
4GB RAM
2.0ghz Core 2 Duo w/ 2MB Cache
Nvidia Quadro graphics
640GB Hard Drive

Inspiron 1545 Laptop:
4GB RAM
2.53ghz Processor w/ 6MB Cache
Standard Intel Graphics
500GB Hard Drive

Custom Desktop:
6GB RAM
2.5ghz Processor w/ 2MB Cache
Nvidia Geforce 9800GT graphics
1.5TB Hard Drive

Having performance issues on my D630 don't make a whole lot of sense. When I say performance, I mean a little lag between menus opening, and windows coming into focus, as well as applications closing. The D630 has dedicated grpahics, which are not the most advanced but should be good enough to handle KDE. My desktop also has a processor with 2MB cache and Nvidia graphics, and the responsiveness is amazing (you'd almost think it's XFCE, it's that fast!). The Inspiron laptop has a faster processor, but standard Intel graphics.

So what doesn't make sense is that both of my other systems run KDE 4.4 extremely fast and responsive, while my D630 has heavily noticeable lag. The inspiron has standard graphics, my D630 has dedicated graphics. My desktop has a processor with a 2MB cache and even that is faster.

Has anyone had similar experiences?

Last edited by jlacroix (2010-05-12 16:55:14)

evot · 2010-05-10 06:56:45

Maybe you could check your nvidia settings.
You can try to make it to use performance mode instead of adaptive. That might give faster response, because it don't have that adaptation time delay...

Those are just simple ideas to try.

Labello · 2010-05-10 07:16:27

i experienced a similar problem and it was easily fixable.

i had updated my kernel with pacman and had forgotten to simply reinstall nvidia and nvidia-utils. after log out everything was fine again. so just remember to reinstall your nvidia-driver after every change that occurs to your kernel packages.

jlacroix · 2010-05-10 19:00:56

evot wrote:

Maybe you could check your nvidia settings.
You can try to make it to use performance mode instead of adaptive. That might give faster response, because it don't have that adaptation time delay...
Those are just simple ideas to try.

That's a good point. I don't put my video card on performance mode because it makes it run hot enough to boil water (literally). I was thinking that sense my Inspiron with a basic Intel card can handle KDE just fine, I figured my Latitude should be able to as well.

Labello wrote:

i experienced a similar problem and it was easily fixable.
i had updated my kernel with pacman and had forgotten to simply reinstall nvidia and nvidia-utils. after log out everything was fine again. so just remember to reinstall your nvidia-driver after every change that occurs to your kernel packages.

I have direct rendering. I checked. However, I reinstalled Nvidia anyway and I had the same issue.

Now here's a bit more info. I tried KDE with no desktop effects enabled, and it seems to be just as slow. I will need to do more testing to confirm this though. Basically what happens (for example) is I can click on the K Menu, and artifacts appear on the screen before the menu does, and the menu can take a second or two to appear. When I drag windows around, they lag. In fact, everything lags.

I guess I shouldn't worry about this since I'm getting a new laptop next month but I guess I want to make it tolerable until then.

Last question: Is there any Nvidia-related tweaks I should put in my xorg.conf that affects KDE performance?

praavDa · 2010-05-10 19:59:06

Hello,

I don't know if this will help You, but...two days ago I installed xorg1.8 from testing + newest beta drivers for nvidia graphics cards. My KDE was working as You had written - laggy. Simple autohiding panels weren't showing for few seconds after I hovered over them and my setup was sufficient for running Vista / Win 7 - so I thought, that this is not the case.

First logical step for me was instalation of newest possible packages from pacman / aur. I didn't noticed any change.

I was wondering for few days and finally I decided to gave new xorg a chance. I had read that it had problems with nvidia so I downloaded newest beta (195.36.24) drivers. Then, I installed xorg1.8 and got an basic configs. I needed to reainstal synaptics and evded from pacman after instalation of xorg from testing to recreate config files. The only tweaks for my graphics card (GF 8600M GT) that I have in xorg.conf are:

Section "Screen"
    Identifier     "Screen0"
    Device         "Card0"
    Monitor        "Monitor0"
    DefaultDepth    24
    Option         "AddARGBGLXVisuals" "True"
    Option         "RenderAccel" "true"
    Option         "NoLogo" "true"
    Option         "AGPFastWrite" "true"
    Option         "EnablePageFlip" "true"
    Option         "TwinView" "0"
    Option         "metamodes" "1280x800_60 +0+0"
    SubSection     "Display"
        Depth       24
    EndSubSection
EndSection

Section "Extensions"
    Option       "Composite" "Enable"
EndSection

I don't know if those are needed and most probably some of them are turned on by default in newer drivers but they work for me and I don't want to mess with them:)

I have most eye-candy effects turned on in KDE, forced antialiasing and anizotropic filtering. I remember that in system settings / desktop effects / advanced I can choose between OpenGL mode: Texture from Pixmap or Shared Memory. Most people write that shared memory is faster and this is also true for me.

[edit]
Originally I had written, that Shared Memory wasn't faster for me - but with actual setup it is a better choice. It even helped me with slowdowns caused by KDE wallpaper slideshow.

Last edited by praavDa (2010-05-10 20:05:56)

jlacroix · 2010-05-10 20:15:20

praavDa wrote:

Hello,
I don't know if this will help You, but...two days ago I installed xorg1.8 from testing + newest beta drivers for nvidia graphics cards. My KDE was working as You had written - laggy. Simple autohiding panels weren't showing for few seconds after I hovered over them and my setup was sufficient for running Vista / Win 7 - so I thought, that this is not the case.
First logical step for me was instalation of newest possible packages from pacman / aur. I didn't noticed any change.
I was wondering for few days and finally I decided to gave new xorg a chance. I had read that it had problems with nvidia so I downloaded newest beta (195.36.24) drivers. Then, I installed xorg1.8 and got an basic configs. I needed to reainstal synaptics and evded from pacman after instalation of xorg from testing to recreate config files. The only tweaks for my graphics card (GF 8600M GT) that I have in xorg.conf are:
Section "Screen"
    Identifier     "Screen0"
    Device         "Card0"
    Monitor        "Monitor0"
    DefaultDepth    24
    Option         "AddARGBGLXVisuals" "True"
    Option         "RenderAccel" "true"
    Option         "NoLogo" "true"
    Option         "AGPFastWrite" "true"
    Option         "EnablePageFlip" "true"
    Option         "TwinView" "0"
    Option         "metamodes" "1280x800_60 +0+0"
    SubSection     "Display"
        Depth       24
    EndSubSection
EndSection

Section "Extensions"
    Option       "Composite" "Enable"
EndSection
I don't know if those are needed and most probably some of them are turned on by default in newer drivers but they work for me and I don't want to mess with them:)
I have most eye-candy effects turned on in KDE, forced antialiasing and anizotropic filtering. I remember that in system settings / desktop effects / advanced I can choose between OpenGL mode: Texture from Pixmap or Shared Memory. Most people write that shared memory is faster and this is also true for me.
[edit]
Originally I had written, that Shared Memory wasn't faster for me - but with actual setup it is a better choice. It even helped me with slowdowns caused by KDE wallpaper slideshow.

Thanks I will give that a shot tonight.

karoshi · 2010-05-10 20:19:35

Tweaks for nvidia drivers in xorg.conf when using KDE were necessary about a year ago or so. NVIDIA driver nowadays should just work fine without them.

My xorg.conf looks like this, for example:

Section "Device"
    Identifier     "Device0"
    Driver         "nvidia"
    VendorName     "NVIDIA Corporation"
EndSection

Section "Screen"
    Identifier     "Screen0"
    Device         "Device0"
    Monitor        "Monitor0"
    Option         "DynamicTwinView" "0"
    DefaultDepth    24
    SubSection     "Display"
        Depth       24
        Modes      "1280x1024"
    EndSubSection
EndSection

In many cases, things should even work perfectly with no xorg.conf at all...
Removing all kinds of tweaks if experiencing troubles with KDE? Maybe worth a shot...

bwat47 · 2010-05-10 20:22:44

KDE has always been laggy for me and I dont know why. whether is been version 3 or 4 and whether I am using fglrx or OSS drivers. The main menu takes forever to open, apps take forever to open, nothing feels responsive at all. Vista looks like a speed daemon in comparison Main reason why I much prefer gnome.

jlacroix · 2010-05-10 20:27:28

bwat47 wrote:

KDE has always been laggy for me and I dont know why. whether is been version 3 or 4 and whether I am using fglrx or OSS drivers. The main menu takes forever to open, apps take forever to open, nothing feels responsive at all. Vista looks like a speed daemon in comparison Main reason why I much prefer gnome.

I tried GNOME on this laptop and it runs very fast, but I don't like GNOME all that much.

praavDa · 2010-05-10 20:33:39

karoshi wrote:

Removing all kinds of tweaks if experiencing troubles with KDE? Maybe worth a shot...

karoshi is right here - first obvious choice is to remove all tweaks, return to the default setup and try one change at a time. It is an rather lenghty process but the time invested is worth every second - in the end You will have system tuned specially for Your needs and computer.

jlacroix · 2010-05-11 02:33:51

I tried to change the settings to shared memory but unfortunately that did not help.

jlacroix · 2010-05-12 16:54:53

All:

Thank you all for the responses.

I did some tweaking as suggested in this thread (I didn't get a chance to post back until now) and I think I'm in better shape than I was.

As suggested, I commented out everything in my xorg.conf file that wasn't required. That made a large improvement. I then set it up to use shared memory, and that made a slight improvement (that didn't make an improvement until I tweaked the xorg.conf file). For now, it's working really good and tolerable, though it's still not as good as I would have liked it to be. Unless you guys know any other tweaks, the bottleneck is probably my CPU at this point. At least it's tolerable now though, so I think I am good.

Arch Linux

#1 2010-05-09 21:06:03

[Solved] KDE 4.4 Performance Issues

#2 2010-05-10 06:56:45

Re: [Solved] KDE 4.4 Performance Issues

#3 2010-05-10 07:16:27

Re: [Solved] KDE 4.4 Performance Issues

#4 2010-05-10 19:00:56

Re: [Solved] KDE 4.4 Performance Issues

#5 2010-05-10 19:59:06

Re: [Solved] KDE 4.4 Performance Issues

#6 2010-05-10 20:15:20

Re: [Solved] KDE 4.4 Performance Issues

#7 2010-05-10 20:19:35

Re: [Solved] KDE 4.4 Performance Issues

#8 2010-05-10 20:22:44

Re: [Solved] KDE 4.4 Performance Issues

#9 2010-05-10 20:27:28

Re: [Solved] KDE 4.4 Performance Issues

#10 2010-05-10 20:33:39

Re: [Solved] KDE 4.4 Performance Issues

#11 2010-05-11 02:33:51

Re: [Solved] KDE 4.4 Performance Issues

#12 2010-05-12 16:54:53

Re: [Solved] KDE 4.4 Performance Issues

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