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Noorquacker

Member

Registered: 2017-08-16

Posts: 15

Kate is now extremely slow to start up

Hi, I've been using Kate as my go-to text editor for nearly 3 years now, and it's never failed me since.
However, with some recent update, Kate takes around 24 seconds to start up as opposed to feeling nearly instant, and it's really been bothering me. I've been dealing with it for a couple weeks at most, and just recently I tried out kate-git from the AUR and even then it ran slow. I'm at a loss for trying to find out what the cause is, since I've tried seeing if iotop or htop show a spike in CPU or disk activity and they're both fine.
Even worse, I had to try out Fedora in a VM and I installed Kate for the heck of it and even in a Fedora VM it started nearly instantly. I haven't seen this issue happen anywhere else, so is there any way to even figure out the cause of this?

Lone_Wolf

Administrator

From: Netherlands, Europe

Registered: 2005-10-04

Posts: 15,332

Re: Kate is now extremely slow to start up

execute

$ time kate

in a terminal, close kate (as soon as it allows you to do that) and post the terminal output .

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Disliking systemd intensely, but not satisfied with alternatives so focusing on taming systemd.

clean chroot building not flexible enough ?
Try clean chroot manager by graysky

V1del

Forum Moderator

Registered: 2012-10-16

Posts: 25,331

Re: Kate is now extremely slow to start up

Works fine here, that specific timeout sounds *dbusy*, what's your output of

printenv | grep DBUS
systemctl --user status dbus
#going to be a lot of output
strace kate

you might want to post that last one to a https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/List_o … n_services

Noorquacker

Member

Registered: 2017-08-16

Posts: 15

Re: Kate is now extremely slow to start up

execute

$ time kate

in a terminal, close kate (as soon as it allows you to do that) and post the terminal output .

kate  0.47s user 0.07s system 2% cpu 25.956 total

Works fine here, that specific timeout sounds *dbusy*, what's your output of

printenv | grep DBUS
systemctl --user status dbus
#going to be a lot of output
strace kate

you might want to post that last one to a https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/List_o … n_services

DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS=unix:path=/run/user/1000/bus

dbus's service had some interesting things to note. This popped up when I ran Kate:

Jun 19 05:23:56 river dbus-daemon[6282]: [session uid=1000 pid=6282] Activating via systemd: service name='org.kde.ActivityManager' unit='plasma-kactivitymanagerd.service' requested by ':1.529' (uid=1000 pid=81682 comm="kate ")
Jun 19 05:25:56 river dbus-daemon[6282]: [session uid=1000 pid=6282] Failed to activate service 'org.kde.ActivityManager': timed out (service_start_timeout=120000ms)

For strace, I noticed that it doesn't change for nearly 20 seconds while it starts, so I made one for strace output before getting done being stuck forever and another afterwards:
https://pastebin.com/PUsef55Q

The full output is too big for Pastebin, ControlC, and Ghostbin, so there goes that

Noorquacker

Member

Registered: 2017-08-16

Posts: 15

Re: Kate is now extremely slow to start up

Fixed thanks to looking at the dbus service. I looked at the plasma-kactivitymanagerd service, saw it couldn't open display, so I added the following to /usr/lib/systemd/user/plasma-kactivitymanagerd.service under the service section:

Environment="DISPLAY=:0"

And it worked! Kate now starts up nearly instantly.

CarbonChauvinist

Member

Registered: 2012-06-16

Posts: 413

Website

Re: Kate is now extremely slow to start up

How are you starting plasma? Setting the display should be handled by your dm.

At any rate, if you have to change a service don't edit in /usr as that will be overwritten with subsequent updates. Put the override in /etc, or better yet use systemctl edit to create a drop in file and let systemd handle it seamlessly.

Last edited by CarbonChauvinist (2021-06-28 02:30:16)

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"the wind-blown way, wanna win? don't play"

Noorquacker

Member

Registered: 2017-08-16

Posts: 15

Re: Kate is now extremely slow to start up

Ah, sorry, I should've mentioned, I'm on i3wm. As far as I know, plasma-kactivitymanagerd starts with systemd in user mode and that's it.
I'll take a look into that, thank you. As far as I know, this issue is essentially solved though

V1del

Forum Moderator

Registered: 2012-10-16

Posts: 25,331

Re: Kate is now extremely slow to start up

How are you starting i3? If via startx and it doesn't follow the template as mentioned in https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Xinit#xinitrc that could be the reason and it would be better if you fixed that. Otherwise you are going to run into other stuff that doesn't have this set. And there's the /etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc.d/50-systemd-user.sh script that you want to source whichh will automatically set DISPLAY and XAUTHORITY for all user services.

Last edited by V1del (2021-06-28 08:49:22)