KDE + Compiz sluggish after running fine for a while

[NotExcessive]

Hi all;

I've installed the current version of KDE onto my Acer 5745G laptop. Prior to installing KDE, I had (and still have) Gnome + Compiz on it, with no problems. I do like KDE though as it has FAR more toys in it.

However, a problem has popped up now. Over the past day or so, the system will boot, it will run fine for a while (either minutes or tens of minutes) and then, with no apparent cause, the response time for certain GUI events will slow right down.

What I mean by that is, you can be doing your normal work on the machine, and then find that if you click on the task manager in the bottom panel, nothing will happen. It won't switch to another application, although the popup description box shows immediately when you hover the mouse over the application name in the task manager. Another example is, I have an auto-hide panel at the top of my screen. When this condition happens, moving the mouse to the top of the screen doesn't cause the panel to show.

While all this is happening, you can rotate the desktop cube with ctl+alt+left click on the mouse and the system spins the cube without delay. Also, you can move the mouse into the top right screen corner and all the open applications will zoom into formation on the desktop and if you click on any application it instantly zooms to the foreground.... so I'm thinking it's a KDE problem and not anything to do with Compiz.

When you're in any program at any time, the program itself behaves fine, with no hesitation.

After a while of course, the sluggish functions pop back to life and panels/task manager work fine (and all of the actions you've performed in frustration have been queued up and so they fire off machine gun style - you did 50 things while it was asleep? Watch those 50 things happen in the space of two seconds!). And then soon, we can have the cycle repeat again. This is driving me nuts.

Can anyone help on the cure?

[timothyRlamora]

Hi, I have Kde 4.6 and I have compiz running, this is what I have installed compizconfig-python,compiz-bcop,libcompizconfig-0.8.4-r1,compizplugins-extra-0.8.6-r1,compizplugins-main-0.8.6,compizplugins-unsupported-0.8.4-r1,compiz-0.8.6-r2,compiz-fusion-0.8.6. check to see if you have any of these if you don't install them and try kde compiz again, if not you can click on system settings and desktop effects and click on advanced click on opengl and set it to xrender, the click on disable functionality checks and see if that works, also check to see if you have the correct video card driver installed also check if you have it set by open the terminal su-password then type eselect opengl list for example I have nvidia card so my output in the terminal would be 1 nvidia 2.xorg-x11. so I would type in my terminal eselect opengl set 1 to set it to my nvidia card

[NotExcessive]

Yes, I have all of those packages installed, eselect opengl shows nvidia, and I don't have desktop effects enabled any longer (used to, but switching on/off doesn't seem to have any effect).

[sabayonino]

Hi

remember, you choose your Engine Effetcs (not Kwin but Compiz) in Kmenu-->Settings--->Default >Applications (or something like...)

[Fitzcarraldo]

If you press Ctrl-Esc, a window will pop-up with a list of everything that's running and the CPU resources it''s using. Launch that, leave it open and watch what happens when the desktop slows right down. Or you can open a Konsole window and run the top command (or install htop and run that in a Konsole window, as it's better than top). See if you can spot either a new process running or which process is suddenly grabbing most of the CPU.

Also, I have Loose Binding and Indirect Rendering unticked in the Fusion Icon menu.

[NotExcessive]

Yes I tried the System Activity Monitor when the problem first arose, but it never showed anything loading the CPU up by more than 2%.

Looking at the Compiz options, I turned off both indirect rendering and loose binding but there doesn't seem to be any difference - might have to leave it running for a while to find out. Mind you, I've read some conflicting reports about what these should be set to (one of them is at http://forum.compiz.org/viewtopic.php?f=139&t=7319&start=0).

[timothyRlamora]

check to see if you have nvidia-settings installed and fusion icon, with fusion icon you can easily change your window managers, see if that helps. I had problems until I installed nvidia-settings

[NotExcessive]

Yep this is driving me nuts all right... I've tried all combinations of loose binding/indirect rendering, I have fusion-icon, nvidia-settings and nvidia-xconfig, I've tried running Kwin, gone back to Compiz, nothing makes any difference at all. Programs run just fine; but anything panel- or desktop-related goes to sleep for anywhere from seconds to minutes and then reawakens. System load shows nothing.

There just has to be something about this particular laptop model that KDE doesn't like. Gnome ran without a hitch. Perhaps the nvidia driver is simply brain-damaged?

[raman]

Nope, have the same problem on desktop comp. i was doing the same. Switch to Kwin and gain to Compiz. It's help for a moment. In Kwin I have processor taken about 50-100%!!! by X and kwin sometimes freezed kded4. Sometimes logout and everything is going back to normal, but one moment later - again some problem.
I deleted all files and directores from schema /etc/skel and copy new fresh files. I lost my customization and everything. It's help a lot to stabilize Compiz, but again some small changes in setting and Compiz going crazy. I setup Compiz and I don't dare to touch any options. For now is working ok, but it's not a stable work for me.
This is KDE 4.6 problem.
I think problem with magneto-kde is the KDE problem, but i don't know why he show up. Starting with empty KDE session everytime is not solusion for me. It's like "going around the problem", but for now helps many ppl. Like I write to me it's wrong solution for me, so I simply remove magneto-kde. I'm waiting for a moment, when the bug will be solved.
So my request, could you give some official feedback, if the problem will be soved? I will install magneto-kde again.

[NotExcessive]

Here's something strange: seeing as how this seems to be panel-related, I had a prod inside all of the items in the top and bottom panels. When I examined the system tray widget, I found, inside system tray settings, some widgets that didn't appear in the system tray (I had been playing around with widgets a few days ago but thought I'd removed them all and cleaned up my desktop). The ones of interest are easy SSH connection, weather forecast, and bubblemon as shown below:

Screenshot.png (69.04 KiB) Viewed 781 times

Now I know from previous experience with easy SSH connection, that it gave me nothing but grief (it ran once I installed/reinstalled and configured it, but every time I rebooted the machine, it would show up as broken (and when this happened, it took out the pager widget as well, making it fall over badly), so I decided to toss it.

So what I did was check the boxes under "extra items" to make the widgets show, closed the system tray settings window, right-clicked on these widgets to configure them, got them showing nicely (except for easy SSH connection, which remained showing as a big red box with an "X" in it saying "I give up"), and then right-clicked to "remove this..." to delete them from the system tray. They disappeared from the system tray, but when I go back into system tray settings, their entries are still there.

I suspect this might be what's causing the problem, especially since easy SSH connection always ends up breaking the pager widget. So... how do I get rid of these things permanently, in case their presence is the cause of this problem?