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pseudonomous

Member

Registered: 2008-04-23

Posts: 349

extremely slow kde environment w/ nvidia drivers [solved]

Hello Everyone,

I've noticed that with combination of:

local/xorg-server 1.11.2-1 (xorg)
local/kde-meta-kdebase 4.7-1.1 (kde-meta)
local/nvidia-lts 285.05.09-1

Linux hostname 2.6.32-lts #1 SMP Tue Aug 30 07:33:25 UTC 2011 i686 Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 CPU 2.80GHz GenuineIntel GNU/Linux

That kde has becom un-usably slow.  Applications take forever to start, moving windows causes them to leave "trails".  While I've listed the NVIDIA drivers I'm using above, the problem persists when using the vesa and noveau drivers as well.  My graphics card is:

01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation NV44 [Quadro NVS 285] (rev a1)

I've tried moving my .nvidia-settings-rc, .kderc and .kde/ folder to backup locations and logging in, but the desktop is still unusable, albeit slightly less un-usable.  I've been using xfce with no notice-able issues, including running kde applications (well, running amarok and konsole, at least) withen xfce.  Anybody have any ideas what could be going on and/or how to re-achieve usable performance?

Last edited by pseudonomous (2011-11-17 18:03:50)

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ewaller

Administrator

From: Pasadena, CA

Registered: 2009-07-13

Posts: 20,612

Re: extremely slow kde environment w/ nvidia drivers [solved]

What is your CPU load look like?
Is Nepomuk file indexing running? Can you check to see if it has gone off to La La land trying to index a pdf file?

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pseudonomous

Member

Registered: 2008-04-23

Posts: 349

Re: extremely slow kde environment w/ nvidia drivers [solved]

I never really figured out what was causing problems, but I did notice the following things:

Running with a single display (normally I use two), things were just barely usable, adding a second monitor w/ the nvidia settings wizard completely screwed things up (but only in KDE, not in XFCE), I mean,you'd see the normal display, but then the display would be slowly replaced by all black, scrolling up from the bottom of the screen, until it reached the top.  At which point the desktop would display again, but again the black would scroll up.

Anyways, the latest kernel-lts + headers + nvidia-lts no longer exhibits this behavior.  I guess the problem is solved.

Though one thing is worth pointing out:

I've changed my xorg.conf so that it starts in twinview mode with both displays active before KDE loads; it's possible that this has had some effect.   I've also disabled all desktop effects.

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... imagine I'm making this argument without referencing cartoons.