[solved] Most applications suddently extremely slow to launch

squeakychair · 2023-04-26 01:47:29

Hello,

I'm recently having trouble with my KDE Plasma desktop. It has worked fine for months and my hardware isn't super old or anything. Of course, I've tried restarting and relogging, neither fix the issue.

When I try opening some applications Plasma will show the usual launching animations... the icon appears on my start bar, I get the bouncing cursor... but then both disappear and the application doesn't show up. The System Monitor shows the application has launched so, for example, Firefox will throw an error if I try opening a second instance. If I wait a long time (1 - 5 minutes) the application will suddenly show up.

Surprisingly, if I launch an application then immediately Sleep the machine, the application will be there immediately when the machine wakes up. (Is this the world's first recorded instance of something working better on Linux *with* sleep?)

I am running Wayland, but this happens in X11 too.

I tried the advice here but it didn't fix the issues: https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php … 5#p2096495

There was an issue exposed by the glibc update where ~/.config/plasma-org.kde.plasma.desktop-appletsrc

This happens with most of my applications including some native (KDE's Skanpage), some GTK (Firefox), but some others work fine an AUR AppImage (Workflowy) and the built-in Settings and Konsole.

Running Skanpage from the terminal showed this... but I'm not sure if it's a red herring. The first line showed up right away. The second & third lines 1-2 minutes later. Then 1-2 minutes after that the program opened.

dan@t480s> skanpage
kf.i18n: KLocalizedString: Using an empty domain, fix the code. msgid: "New document" msgid_plural: "" msgctxt: ""
Cannot initialize model with data QJsonObject(). missing: QJsonValue(string, "urls")
file:///usr/lib/qt/qml/org/kde/kirigami.2/AboutItem.qml:209: ReferenceError: page is not defined

Does anyone have an idea how to troubleshoot this further, or even better if you know what caused this and it's as simple as rolling back a package?

I am up to date from pacman, but haven't seen anything online about recent KDE updates causing issues.

Thanks,
Dan

Last edited by squeakychair (2023-04-27 11:03:51)

seth · 2023-04-26 06:20:02

The S3 condition suggests some timeout, so let's roundup the usual suspects:

loginctl session-status
echo $DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS
hostnamectl
pacman -Qs 'flatpak|portal'

And please post your complete system journal for the boot:

sudo journalctl -b | curl -F 'file=@-' 0x0.st

squeakychair · 2023-04-26 11:40:18

Thanks seth for the quick reply and sharing your expertise.

These are captured on a fresh Restart, followed by opening Firefox, then Sleep/wake to bypass the minutes of waiting for Firefox to open. I'd like to audit the journalctl contents before sharing the full dump to a public forum. Maybe just reading through it all will highlight the issue. In the meantime, all the other info looks ok, do you agree?

Thanks,
Dan

dan@t480s> loginctl session-status
2 - dan (1000)
           Since: Wed 2023-04-26 07:15:11 EDT; 2min 51s ago
          Leader: 611 (sddm-helper)
            Seat: seat0; vc2
             TTY: tty2
         Service: sddm; type wayland; class user
         Desktop: KDE
           State: active
            Unit: session-2.scope
                  ├─611 /usr/lib/sddm/sddm-helper --socket /tmp/sddm-auth9ec47e24-0830-4df2-b2c5-9040ca08955c --id 1 --start "/usr/lib/plasma-dbus-run-session-if-needed /usr/bin/startplas>
                  ├─627 /usr/bin/kwalletd5 --pam-login 6 8
                  └─628 /usr/bin/startplasma-wayland

Apr 26 07:15:11 t480s systemd[1]: Started Session 2 of User dan.
Apr 26 07:15:11 t480s sddm-helper[628]: Jumping to VT 2
Apr 26 07:15:11 t480s sddm-helper[628]: VT mode didn't need to be fixed

dan@t480s> echo $DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS
unix:path=/run/user/1000/bus

dan@t480s> hostnamectl
 Static hostname: t480s
       Icon name: computer-laptop
         Chassis: laptop ?
      Machine ID: ****b2d5
         Boot ID: ****dfcd
Operating System: Arch Linux                      
          Kernel: Linux 6.2.12-arch1-1
    Architecture: x86-64
 Hardware Vendor: Lenovo
  Hardware Model: ThinkPad T480s
Firmware Version: N22ET49W (1.26 )

dan@t480s> pacman -Qs 'flatpak|portal'
local/flatpak 1:1.15.4-1
    Linux application sandboxing and distribution framework (formerly xdg-app)
local/flatpak-kcm 5.27.4-1 (plasma)
    Flatpak Permissions Management KCM
local/xdg-desktop-portal 1.16.0-1
    Desktop integration portals for sandboxed apps
local/xdg-desktop-portal-kde 5.27.4.1-1 (plasma)
    A backend implementation for xdg-desktop-portal using Qt/KF5

seth · 2023-04-26 11:51:08

You've a static hostname, an active session and the dbus path is correct/as expected.

Best contender is flatpak/portal.
The journal isn't supposed to contain any sensitive data, machine and boot ID are not sensitive either, https://www.freedesktop.org/software/sy … ne-id.html
MACs/BSSIDs aren't of any value outside your WiFi range and the APs are yelling them into the environment.

dave91 · 2023-04-26 12:09:09

I had a very similar problem but only on Wayland and a shorter delay. Culprit was xdg-desktop-portal-gtk. Try removing/masking the gtk/gnome portals if you have them installed.

squeakychair · 2023-04-27 01:51:42

Thanks guys, here's the journalctl dump: http://0x0.st/HKya.txt

Even if there was nothing too sensitive in there, it was still a good exercise for me to actually look through everything. A couple items stood out. These were cherry picked, they weren't all together. Some showed up in many places, like Wayland not supporting requestActivate(). I'm not sure what's considered normal vs. what should be fixed.

Apr 26 07:15:17 t480s plasmashell[809]: qt.qpa.wayland: Wayland does not support QWindow::requestActivate()

Apr 26 07:15:20 t480s plasmashell[809]: file:///usr/lib/qt/qml/org/kde/plasma/extras/PlaceholderMessage.qml:238:5: QML Heading: Binding loop detected for property "verticalAlignment"

Apr 26 07:15:23 t480s firefox[1716]: Theme parsing error: gtk.css:1649:16: '-gtk-icon-size' is not a valid property name

Apr 26 07:33:32 t480s kwin_wayland[651]: This plugin does not support raise()

Dave, I don't see xdg-desktop-portal-gtk installed, although I saw some errors in the journal relating to xdg-desktop-portal itself. It doesn't seem like I can/should uninstall that though?

Thanks,
Dan

squeakychair · 2023-04-27 02:58:17

WOW, it was a problem with DNS!

I recently partitioned my home network differently, adding an isolated guest network. While troubleshooting tonight, the slow launch issue suddenly disappeared and I realized my laptop had accidentally jumped over to the new Guest network, which bypasses the Pi-hole.

The confusing bit is that DNS was generally working fine. Addresses were resolving correctly from pings in the Terminal or if I browsed in Firefox (after waiting a couples minutes for it to open lol). The problem was Pi-hole's Conditional Forwarding pointing to the wrong IP for my router/DHCP server. I think this feature is what lets Pi-hole lookup local hostnames, and do reverse lookups of local addresses, which is why pings to google.com worked fine.

Going in/out of Sleep caused these Conditional Forward requests to timeout (as seth originally guessed).

The affected programs were all network-related...
- Settings, Terminal, Dolphin were fine.
- Firefox, Skanpage (wireless document scanning), Workflowy (cloud notes), KMail, Kalendar would all hang trying to launch.

Thank you both for taking time to read and reply to my post! Your ideas helped get me un-stuck and ultimately fix this problem.

Cheers,
Dan

seth · 2023-04-27 06:06:09

Please always remember to mark resolved threads by editing your initial posts subject - so others will know that there's no task left, but maybe a solution to find.
Thanks.

squeakychair · 2023-04-27 11:05:58

Hah, thanks for the reminder! The forum I normally use has a big button to mark topics solved, but also doesn't allow editing anything after a few minutes. Different customs

Necrosis · 2023-05-13 17:40:36

dave91 wrote:

I had a very similar problem but only on Wayland and a shorter delay. Culprit was xdg-desktop-portal-gtk. Try removing/masking the gtk/gnome portals if you have them installed.

Wow, thanks! That helped me! Is it noted somewhere on wiki?

seth · 2023-05-13 19:01:00

The ongoing problem is a recent regression w/ gnome 44 and unrelated to the OPs situation, https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=285590

boltronics · 2023-05-29 06:57:43

Similar networking-related issues here causing a slow-down. Same thing with Firefox taking minutes to start, as did programs like LibreOffice, strangely.

In my case, I have a Docker file hosting a proxy.pac, which Plasma and Firefox (and the auto_proxy environment variable) are all set to reference to conditionally determine proxy settings for a number of hosts I sometimes use that sit behind a VPN. That container had been manually stopped earlier, and I forgot I was running it with `--restart unless-stopped` so it didn't start up again automatically on the next boot.

Either removing the proxy PAC references or starting the container again resolved my performance issues. This thread was very helpful in getting to the bottom of it.

Arch Linux

#1 2023-04-26 01:47:29

[solved] Most applications suddently extremely slow to launch

#2 2023-04-26 06:20:02

Re: [solved] Most applications suddently extremely slow to launch

#3 2023-04-26 11:40:18

Re: [solved] Most applications suddently extremely slow to launch

#4 2023-04-26 11:51:08

Re: [solved] Most applications suddently extremely slow to launch

#5 2023-04-26 12:09:09

Re: [solved] Most applications suddently extremely slow to launch

#6 2023-04-27 01:51:42

Re: [solved] Most applications suddently extremely slow to launch

#7 2023-04-27 02:58:17

Re: [solved] Most applications suddently extremely slow to launch

#8 2023-04-27 06:06:09

Re: [solved] Most applications suddently extremely slow to launch

#9 2023-04-27 11:05:58

Re: [solved] Most applications suddently extremely slow to launch

#10 2023-05-13 17:40:36

Re: [solved] Most applications suddently extremely slow to launch

#11 2023-05-13 19:01:00

Re: [solved] Most applications suddently extremely slow to launch

#12 2023-05-29 06:57:43

Re: [solved] Most applications suddently extremely slow to launch

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