In this week's KDE-CVS-Digest: Quanta gets a table editor. KSVG improves with new gradient algorithms. KStars implements suggestions from the KGUS, aka
KStars Girlfriend Usability Study. Many bugfixes in KMail, KHTML and elsewhere.
Same here. Gentoo user, compiled kde 3.1.4 (& now 3.2.0) from source and have slow start up times on all apps. I've ran strace and confirmed that it is fontconfig scanning all of my fonts. However, fc-cache as root does not fix it. Permissions are okay on all files. 75dpi and 100dpi dirs are included in the scanning. Don't know what other info I can give...
I have Gnome, KDE, win mgrs when I startup. Gnome is reasonably fast.
With KDE 3.2, after "starting system services' for maybe 2 minutes.. it just seems to hang on the desktop and KDE doesn't start. Only way I can usually start it is go ho to a shell and try stopping X and then eventually can get into KDE. Any ideas?
I've been having this problem for weeks now, and this article pointed to the right direction !!
my /etc/hosts file was the faulty part!
it simply had the 127.0.0.1 pointing to localhost
it was missing the addition of 192.168.0.1 myrealhostname
as soon as I changed this file, apps launched much much faster!
Now, I really must know how to adapt this configuration to my usage needs, because I frequently change network config back and forth: home, office, client.
and I really don't feel like changing /etc/hosts everytime...
anyway ! many many thanks for pointing in the right direction , at least in my case.
I have know for quite some time that DNS queries slow down KDE. I first noticed the problem when I didn't have internet acces after I moved.
I have seen here and on other website the suggestion to add a line with the host IP adress and hostname in /etc/hosts and making sure you have "hosts=local,bind" in your /etc/resolv.conf file to make sure that you query /etc/hosts before making a DNS query.
This does solve the problem, but not at source.
First of all, does anyone know why KDE does so many DNS queries while starting up or while launching KDE applications? Is it for logging application events with the host name? If it is, then why know make a single quer while KDE boots and cache it? It seems unlikely that the hostname will change while you are normaly using your computer!
This brings me to the second problem : What happens if your are using DHCP? I happen to use DHCP in my home setup and I frequently add and remove many computers from my network. Therefore, the IP adress allocated to a given box change from time to time. I don't whant to have to update my /etc/hosts file each time I boot a computer to make sure that KDE will be able to resolve the hostname. Furthermore, what happens if your lease expires while your computer is working and you get a different IP?
If anyone knows a place I could find the settings for KDE DNS queries, please tell me!
While I do not provide solutions to the problem, I hope this message will benifit everyone. It is true that you could use the DHCP hoocks on dhclient to run a script to update /etc/hosts but I feel that doing so s a big ugly patch.
This was posted over two years ago, and the problem seems to have popped up again. Who would have thought that KDE and GNU/Linux would have old performance issues (that should by all accounts have long since been fixed) suddenly reappearing just in time for M$ Vista to be launched?
I don't believe it's just a coincidence. Free software projects have been vandalized before, and they will be again. For example, OpenBSD's "Only one remote hole in the default install, in more than 10 years!" was the result of deliberate vandalism. And why do you think M$ has an internal Linux lab? Is it to promote greater interoperability between M$ Windows and GNU/Linux? I think its purpose is more sinister.
I think there is something fundamentally wrong with the way name resolution is done in GNU/Linux and all the BSDs, and it always comes back to haunt us (lest one should forget the Halloween documents):
The whole process depends critically on two system files, /etc/resolv.conf and /etc/hosts. These files are in constant danger of getting clobbered by any number of processes, (and dhclient is a major culprit.) There is a mishmash of network configuration GUIs in both Gnome and KDE that don't do what they say they do, and generally just bork things up. Nobody seems to care, and these GUI apps never get fixed. In particular, KDE likes to really mess up /etc/network/interfaces on my Debian system.
Second, too many applications (as the parent noted) depend all too critically and unnecessarily on proper and speedy name resolution for their basic functioning. Why does a Web browser (namely Konqueror) need to do forward and reverse lookups on the current hostname and wait for DNS resolution timeouts before it even starts up? I don't know what the purpose of these checks is, but the user is not alerted to anything amiss when these lookups fail. The startup of even the simplest application is delayed by many seconds for no good reason.
The problem is even deeper than a mere inconvenience, however frustrating that inconvenionce may be. I once had an OpenBSD machine with misconfigured name resolution, and "localhost" somehow resolved to "localhost.net", which, believe it or not, is a registered domain name. I had the misfortune of entering my root password into what I thought was my own machine's CUPS configuration page at "http://localhost:631/", and by the time I realized what had happened a few seconds later, it was too late: my machine was pwned. Lesson learned: never trust the resolution of "localhost". Always type out "127.0.0.1" or "::1" when referring to your own machine.
And then there's the Qwest DSL modem that tries to run its own DNS server and forces all its dhcp clients to use it regardless of configuration. These crash hard, requiring a factory reset whenever they see a AAAA record request.
Sorry to ramble off topic, but who cares in an obscure old thread like this? Just remember, these issues aren't just limited to KDE.
I had this same problem suddenly on my arcade cabinet running Mandrake 10.
I quickly determined it was network-related, but beat my head against the wall for 6 hours last night, thinking it was related to another change I had made on the machine while trying to get an ADSL modem working.
THIS THREAD WAS A GODSEND. After I saw this thread, I looked and found that my hosts file had never had a 192.168.0.2 (the machine's IP) entry. This had never been a problem before, but I recently replaced my WinXP ICS machine that I had been using as a firewall (don't laugh... I converted my home desktops to Linux before my servers). The new ADSL modem I'm using handles DHCP itself, but it doesn't serve DNS for the internal machines (just forwards everything out)... causing KDE on the arcade machine to timeout left and right... slowing everything.
The reason this took so long to figure out is that my other desktop Linux machine is running Mandrake 10.1, does not have a 192.168.x.x entry in the hosts file, and does not exhibit the problem AT ALL. I guess something changed between their respective KDE/XFree-Vs-xOrg versions and this one no longer depends on the lookups.
Now I guess I need to install DNS on one of my Linux machines, with forwarding to my ISP. :)
Thanks to everyone who contributed to this thread!
The same situation here....very slow start up times, and then when added to /etc/hosts adding my real ip and machine name the startup times boosted a lot...a really huge difference!
this is my /etc/hosts if someone is interested
127.0.0.1 localhost
10.0.0.10 univac #this is the line i added
10.0.0.12 skynet
# IPV6 versions of localhost and co
::1 ip6-localhost ip6-loopback
fe00::0 ip6-localnet
ff00::0 ip6-mcastprefix
ff02::1 ip6-allnodes
ff02::2 ip6-allrouters
ff02::3 ip6-allhosts
Though I was having the same symptoms, my solution wasn't the /etc/hosts file. After reading this post, I thought that the /etc/hosts file must surely be the reason why KDE apps in SUSE 9.3 took minutes, not seconds, to load on a Pentium 4 3.0Ghz, 1G RAM.
After using strace and netstat -ap, I tracked the problem to fam, "the File Alteration Monitor, provides an API that applications can use to be notified when specific files or directories are changed." For some reason (I'm still working on this) fam would go defunct because the default timeout was set to never. Konqueror (my test program) would make a request to the fam deamon and not timeout for over a minute.
I killed the "hung" fam process and started another one finally solving my problem. Hope this helps!
I called support to no avail. Then I started to investigate things.
1) ifconfig was ok, then checked route;
2) took notice of gateway, which was like xyz.virtua.com.br;
3) ping xyz.virtua.com.br and nothing... but www.google.com was instantaneous;
4) called support again... :-/
5) they were useless (want first to check line signals and later dowload speed);
6) decided then to check resolv.conf (I use opendns, but had it disabled then);
7) resolv.conf was ok:
search virtua.com.br
nameserver ip1
nameserver ip2
8) decided to edit resolv.conf with vi. It showed up like this:
nameserver ip1
nameserver ip2
9) oops. where's the search line?
10) pressed [ins] to insert such line, but then the search line misteriously reappeared!
11) just did wq to save things the correct way;
12) after 2 hours of pain, the gw was again pingable and KDE worked just fine.
13) what was it. dunno. could be a null character or whatever.
14) it works now.
15) and you got another place to look... ;-)
16) either way, good luck to you, my KDE friend!
Well, well, well... time to own up to some things.
1) Probably my LCD monitor was unadjusted, after changing from graphics (X) mode to text mode (Linux console);
2) Probably the first line wasn't visible the whole time; when I used cat, the entire resolv.conf showed in the middle of the screen, but with vi the file's first line would be hidden -- pressing insert _and_ enter would make it the second line, thus visible again;
3) They probably fixed something at virtua, after I pestered them some 3 times talking about gateway and whether they would be overloaded (it was on the weekend after all);
4) I only found out this yesterday (monday, the 30th).
Ever since this section is included in the Digest, I wonder:
Many KDE developers are German, yet, the Internationalization Status of German is below that of Danish, Swedish, Hungarian, and even Catalan and Estonian !?
Or is German (and English for that matter) considererd to be 100% translated all the time ?
It's KDE policy that the root language for all strings is English, so there is no English translation team. This page (http://i18n.kde.org/stats/gui/HEAD/index.php) shows that the German translation is 78% complete. So, if you speak German, they likely need your help!
The real translation usually doesn't start until the message freeze. There are several languages that until now have consistently had arround 100% translated GUI strings *in official releases*, and German is one of them. Thus, I don't really see the point of translation report. Derek?
Why there isn't any konqueror plugin downloader only nspluginview/nspluginscan (sure those work just great) but nothing for donwloading the actual plugins from the Net and not just from local directory?!?
Maybe the nspluginscan could be modified to scan some specified URLs to get the plugins?
Only flawless way to get plugins right now seems to be to install Mozilla/Netscape and then download all necessary plugins with them (as plugin maintainers don't seen to want to know about konqueror) and then scan for them within the konqueror... Silly!
Comments
Same here. Gentoo user, compiled kde 3.1.4 (& now 3.2.0) from source and have slow start up times on all apps. I've ran strace and confirmed that it is fontconfig scanning all of my fonts. However, fc-cache as root does not fix it. Permissions are okay on all files. 75dpi and 100dpi dirs are included in the scanning. Don't know what other info I can give...
I have Gnome, KDE, win mgrs when I startup. Gnome is reasonably fast.
With KDE 3.2, after "starting system services' for maybe 2 minutes.. it just seems to hang on the desktop and KDE doesn't start. Only way I can usually start it is go ho to a shell and try stopping X and then eventually can get into KDE. Any ideas?
sounds like a BORKED /etc/hosts
I agree - can you give me some help..plz...
In my hosts file, I added this entry at the beginning:
127.0.0.1 localhost machinename.mydomainname.com nachinename
next entries were there and I left alone:
::1 localhost ip6-localhost ip6-loopback
rest are the fe entries
WOW !
I've been having this problem for weeks now, and this article pointed to the right direction !!
my /etc/hosts file was the faulty part!
it simply had the 127.0.0.1 pointing to localhost
it was missing the addition of 192.168.0.1 myrealhostname
as soon as I changed this file, apps launched much much faster!
Now, I really must know how to adapt this configuration to my usage needs, because I frequently change network config back and forth: home, office, client.
and I really don't feel like changing /etc/hosts everytime...
anyway ! many many thanks for pointing in the right direction , at least in my case.
I have know for quite some time that DNS queries slow down KDE. I first noticed the problem when I didn't have internet acces after I moved.
I have seen here and on other website the suggestion to add a line with the host IP adress and hostname in /etc/hosts and making sure you have "hosts=local,bind" in your /etc/resolv.conf file to make sure that you query /etc/hosts before making a DNS query.
This does solve the problem, but not at source.
First of all, does anyone know why KDE does so many DNS queries while starting up or while launching KDE applications? Is it for logging application events with the host name? If it is, then why know make a single quer while KDE boots and cache it? It seems unlikely that the hostname will change while you are normaly using your computer!
This brings me to the second problem : What happens if your are using DHCP? I happen to use DHCP in my home setup and I frequently add and remove many computers from my network. Therefore, the IP adress allocated to a given box change from time to time. I don't whant to have to update my /etc/hosts file each time I boot a computer to make sure that KDE will be able to resolve the hostname. Furthermore, what happens if your lease expires while your computer is working and you get a different IP?
If anyone knows a place I could find the settings for KDE DNS queries, please tell me!
While I do not provide solutions to the problem, I hope this message will benifit everyone. It is true that you could use the DHCP hoocks on dhclient to run a script to update /etc/hosts but I feel that doing so s a big ugly patch.
Sounds like you have not got your localhost DNS entry set correctly.
This was posted over two years ago, and the problem seems to have popped up again. Who would have thought that KDE and GNU/Linux would have old performance issues (that should by all accounts have long since been fixed) suddenly reappearing just in time for M$ Vista to be launched?
I don't believe it's just a coincidence. Free software projects have been vandalized before, and they will be again. For example, OpenBSD's "Only one remote hole in the default install, in more than 10 years!" was the result of deliberate vandalism. And why do you think M$ has an internal Linux lab? Is it to promote greater interoperability between M$ Windows and GNU/Linux? I think its purpose is more sinister.
I think there is something fundamentally wrong with the way name resolution is done in GNU/Linux and all the BSDs, and it always comes back to haunt us (lest one should forget the Halloween documents):
The whole process depends critically on two system files, /etc/resolv.conf and /etc/hosts. These files are in constant danger of getting clobbered by any number of processes, (and dhclient is a major culprit.) There is a mishmash of network configuration GUIs in both Gnome and KDE that don't do what they say they do, and generally just bork things up. Nobody seems to care, and these GUI apps never get fixed. In particular, KDE likes to really mess up /etc/network/interfaces on my Debian system.
Second, too many applications (as the parent noted) depend all too critically and unnecessarily on proper and speedy name resolution for their basic functioning. Why does a Web browser (namely Konqueror) need to do forward and reverse lookups on the current hostname and wait for DNS resolution timeouts before it even starts up? I don't know what the purpose of these checks is, but the user is not alerted to anything amiss when these lookups fail. The startup of even the simplest application is delayed by many seconds for no good reason.
The problem is even deeper than a mere inconvenience, however frustrating that inconvenionce may be. I once had an OpenBSD machine with misconfigured name resolution, and "localhost" somehow resolved to "localhost.net", which, believe it or not, is a registered domain name. I had the misfortune of entering my root password into what I thought was my own machine's CUPS configuration page at "http://localhost:631/", and by the time I realized what had happened a few seconds later, it was too late: my machine was pwned. Lesson learned: never trust the resolution of "localhost". Always type out "127.0.0.1" or "::1" when referring to your own machine.
And then there's the Qwest DSL modem that tries to run its own DNS server and forces all its dhcp clients to use it regardless of configuration. These crash hard, requiring a factory reset whenever they see a AAAA record request.
Sorry to ramble off topic, but who cares in an obscure old thread like this? Just remember, these issues aren't just limited to KDE.
I had this same problem suddenly on my arcade cabinet running Mandrake 10.
I quickly determined it was network-related, but beat my head against the wall for 6 hours last night, thinking it was related to another change I had made on the machine while trying to get an ADSL modem working.
THIS THREAD WAS A GODSEND. After I saw this thread, I looked and found that my hosts file had never had a 192.168.0.2 (the machine's IP) entry. This had never been a problem before, but I recently replaced my WinXP ICS machine that I had been using as a firewall (don't laugh... I converted my home desktops to Linux before my servers). The new ADSL modem I'm using handles DHCP itself, but it doesn't serve DNS for the internal machines (just forwards everything out)... causing KDE on the arcade machine to timeout left and right... slowing everything.
The reason this took so long to figure out is that my other desktop Linux machine is running Mandrake 10.1, does not have a 192.168.x.x entry in the hosts file, and does not exhibit the problem AT ALL. I guess something changed between their respective KDE/XFree-Vs-xOrg versions and this one no longer depends on the lookups.
Now I guess I need to install DNS on one of my Linux machines, with forwarding to my ISP. :)
Thanks to everyone who contributed to this thread!
The same situation here....very slow start up times, and then when added to /etc/hosts adding my real ip and machine name the startup times boosted a lot...a really huge difference!
this is my /etc/hosts if someone is interested
127.0.0.1 localhost
10.0.0.10 univac #this is the line i added
10.0.0.12 skynet
# IPV6 versions of localhost and co
::1 ip6-localhost ip6-loopback
fe00::0 ip6-localnet
ff00::0 ip6-mcastprefix
ff02::1 ip6-allnodes
ff02::2 ip6-allrouters
ff02::3 ip6-allhosts
Good luck!
Though I was having the same symptoms, my solution wasn't the /etc/hosts file. After reading this post, I thought that the /etc/hosts file must surely be the reason why KDE apps in SUSE 9.3 took minutes, not seconds, to load on a Pentium 4 3.0Ghz, 1G RAM.
After using strace and netstat -ap, I tracked the problem to fam, "the File Alteration Monitor, provides an API that applications can use to be notified when specific files or directories are changed." For some reason (I'm still working on this) fam would go defunct because the default timeout was set to never. Konqueror (my test program) would make a request to the fam deamon and not timeout for over a minute.
I killed the "hung" fam process and started another one finally solving my problem. Hope this helps!
Funny thing I had exactly this same problem.
I called support to no avail. Then I started to investigate things.
1) ifconfig was ok, then checked route;
2) took notice of gateway, which was like xyz.virtua.com.br;
3) ping xyz.virtua.com.br and nothing... but www.google.com was instantaneous;
4) called support again... :-/
5) they were useless (want first to check line signals and later dowload speed);
6) decided then to check resolv.conf (I use opendns, but had it disabled then);
7) resolv.conf was ok:
search virtua.com.br
nameserver ip1
nameserver ip2
8) decided to edit resolv.conf with vi. It showed up like this:
nameserver ip1
nameserver ip2
9) oops. where's the search line?
10) pressed [ins] to insert such line, but then the search line misteriously reappeared!
11) just did wq to save things the correct way;
12) after 2 hours of pain, the gw was again pingable and KDE worked just fine.
13) what was it. dunno. could be a null character or whatever.
14) it works now.
15) and you got another place to look... ;-)
16) either way, good luck to you, my KDE friend!
And thanks to everyone!
Well, well, well... time to own up to some things.
1) Probably my LCD monitor was unadjusted, after changing from graphics (X) mode to text mode (Linux console);
2) Probably the first line wasn't visible the whole time; when I used cat, the entire resolv.conf showed in the middle of the screen, but with vi the file's first line would be hidden -- pressing insert _and_ enter would make it the second line, thus visible again;
3) They probably fixed something at virtua, after I pestered them some 3 times talking about gateway and whether they would be overloaded (it was on the weekend after all);
4) I only found out this yesterday (monday, the 30th).
Erm... sorry about that, Chief!
Ever since this section is included in the Digest, I wonder:
Many KDE developers are German, yet, the Internationalization Status of German is below that of Danish, Swedish, Hungarian, and even Catalan and Estonian !?
Or is German (and English for that matter) considererd to be 100% translated all the time ?
Do I miss something here ?
It's KDE policy that the root language for all strings is English, so there is no English translation team. This page (http://i18n.kde.org/stats/gui/HEAD/index.php) shows that the German translation is 78% complete. So, if you speak German, they likely need your help!
English doesn't ever need translation as all strings are written in English.
The German Translation is far from complete.
The real translation usually doesn't start until the message freeze. There are several languages that until now have consistently had arround 100% translated GUI strings *in official releases*, and German is one of them. Thus, I don't really see the point of translation report. Derek?
Why there isn't any konqueror plugin downloader only nspluginview/nspluginscan (sure those work just great) but nothing for donwloading the actual plugins from the Net and not just from local directory?!?
Maybe the nspluginscan could be modified to scan some specified URLs to get the plugins?
Only flawless way to get plugins right now seems to be to install Mozilla/Netscape and then download all necessary plugins with them (as plugin maintainers don't seen to want to know about konqueror) and then scan for them within the konqueror... Silly!