Kubuntu 6.06 RC is really slow...!

[P-J]

Hi all!

I've just installed Kubuntu 6.06 RC and booted to the KDE desktop and everything is really, really slow.

I did a couple of preferences tweaks which took me an age, then when I clicked to go into a Konsole session the disk started going absolutely bonkers and the system became unusable. I've left it for about at hour and it's still going!

It took me about a minute to switch to a console, where hdparm tells me that DMA for the drive is enabled, and TOP tells me that kdesktop is using 33.5% of the CPU and the rest is free. The drive LED stopped working a while ago but I can hear the drive is going bonkers.

I've never had this problem with any other distro (or earlier Ubuntu versions for that matter!)

Machine is fairly standard hardware - MSI board, AMD64 cpu, 1GB of RAM and an 80GB IDE disk. Nothing exotic here!

Anyone got any ideas what the problem may be? :-\

[askrieger]

You didn't mention the speed of your processor, but it hardly matters. With my amd64 throttled down by powernowd, and 6 KDE screens active including an audio stream, I'm getting less than 10% CPU activity in top. I therefore conclude that you have a Problem (with a capital P). Obviously, your HD should not be grinding away, either. What else besides KDE is listed in top? What happens when you try to kill KDE with ctl-alt-BS?

[P-J]

Thanks for responsing. The CPU is only a 3000+ but that's obviously acceptable for running, well, any OS!

I restarted the machine (eventually, when I could!) and it was fine. I imagine it's a bug in KDE that only shows itself on the first run.

However, when I restarted, gam_server started using all of the CPU and a bit of Googling showed that I wasn't alone with this issue.

With no resolution in sight, I renamed the gam_server executable to gam_server~ (so it wouldn't run) and the problem has now gone.

Does anyone know if it's going to cause an issue if this isn't running?

[askrieger]

When this problem happened under Breezy, there were a few programs that warned about no gam_server, but I can't recall anything significant that even did that. In other words, I think a buggy gam_server is worse than none at all.