Dolphin painfully slow opening - second round.

[oshunluvr]

My first 12.04 install went OK for a while except it would never reboot - always just locked up forcing a manual restart. Eventually and suddenly - Dolphin started having this tremendous delay opening and responding. This was bad enough I did a full re-install. Not my usual response to a problem, but it had gotten to the point I could no longer use the system.

The new install fared better. Rebooting now works as expected. I opted to leave nepomuk, akonadi and whatever demons (not a misspelling) they include on the system for a change just to see how they had improved - although I still don't use any of their "services."

This morning, the Dolphin issue returned, although not quite as bad. There's about a half-second delay when I open it and a similar delay for every action I attempt using it. Mouse hover, changing directories, closing, whatever. It takes almost a full second for a folder to populate with icons once opened. I did a small test - launched dolphin from a terminal with the time command and closed it as soon as the "X" folder decoration to do so was available. The result was 3.8 secs - about four times slower than I am used to.

I cannot for the life of me figure out what is causing this or what started it. I did some updates last night, but I can't tell what might have caused this. Nothing is being logged, dolphin is not kicking out errors, CPUs 99.X % idle, 5GB free RAM...

Any ideas where to look? This is bugging the crap out of me....

[oshunluvr]

New info: I left dolphin open for several minutes while doing other tasks. When I went back to it, it worked normally. After closing and re-opening it, the slowness returned.

[james147]

When you did a reinstall did you keep your home drive and settings? If so try resetting dolphin to its defaults be renaming or moving ~/.kde/share/config/dolphinrc

[oshunluvr]

Also, whatever is causing this problem is also causing Amarok to do the same thing. Since I use both programs to access my server, maybe it's a network thing?

[oshunluvr]

Good idea James, but no change....

[james147]

Do you experience the same with a new user?

[Batty]

I get a bit of a slow down the same as you. I put it down to dolphin "waking up" my NAS. (Synology Disk Station DS410j)

Once my NAS status light is back on and ready Dolphin is nice and quick.

I'm accessing the NAS using NFS, mounted in my home folder via a fstab entry

[oshunluvr]

Currently, Amarok takes about 5 minutes to start up and then it's minutes between focus when you try and click anything. I suspect the problems are related to networking. If I kill amarok and amarok collection scanner, dolphin returns to normal after a few minutes. My entire music collection is on the server and I have several networked connections set up in dolphin.

One of the biggest differences between this (12.04) install and my last (11.04) install is I've left network manager installed. Previously to 12.04, I've always purged it and configured my network manually. I am attempting to give all the native apps a fair shake before dumping them. I may try removing network manager and I must review my NFS mounts to be sure I haven't done something wrong there.

ps James: I haven't attempted a new user yet, but when I use dolphin as root via the service menu I still see the pause - which makes me think it's effecting all users. I'll try it anyway though just to be sure.

[SecretCode]

If you run sudo iotop while Dolphin is displaying these delays, do you see any high I/O apps? It could be a batch job.

[oshunluvr]

Tonight my new install deteriated to the same level as the previous - Dolphin unusably slow and the system won't reboot. This time even "ls" issued in a terminal doesn't respond. I am still feeling networking is behind it. One of the things I've done is to link all my networked devices through Dolphin - a samba shared device, my box account via webdav, ssh to my server and so on. This might be part of the problem. The offending apps show disk sleep in ksysguard when this behavior starts.

However, at the moment I'm being "muoned." I did another new install to a spare partition. When I clicked "Full Upgrade" and Apply, Muon began removing KDE. No notice about any packages begin removed, just "317 upgradable" and "320 to install/upgrade." At this moment, I'm letting it run to see what state it leaves me in. I'm going to dump dpkg -l after it finishes trashing this install so I can report this buggy piece of junk package manager before I switch back to apper. I'd like to know who's idea it was to make this thing the default package manager in it's current state. Thank goodness for apt-get...

p.s. Same behavior for second user if I log in first and then out and back in as second user. Logging in as second user first seems to avoid the problem. I'll test this a bit more before moving on (once muon is done :rolleyes: )

[james147]

The offending apps show disk sleep in ksysguard when this behavior starts.Disk sleep indicated that the cpu is waiting for disk io to finish, if its in this state for a long period of time then it probably means there is something wrong with your hard disk (or the connection to your hard disk). I would check all the cables and see if any are loose if not I would try an alternative storage media to see if that experiences the same issue.

The issue surviving a new install might also indicate a hardware issue.

[oshunluvr]

Agreed that there might be a hardware issue. But my new install doesn't have the issue. More likely it is a problem with a specific file system - I'll have to do some digging to find out which one.

[SecretCode]

Did you look at iotop? One reason to suspect other tasks (consuming I/O though not CPU which you've said is low), rather than a permanent hardware issue, is your observation that after leaving Dolphin for a while it becomes more responsive.

[oshunluvr]

Latest update:

Ok, discovered and fixed one problem but it hasn't helped. I did discover a network issue but that is now resolved but Dolphin still freezes.

iotop shows no activity, ksysguard shows Dolphin in disk sleep, htop shows htop, iotop, and ksysguard as the most active processes!

BTW, df, lsof, and ls freeze in a terminal also...

[oshunluvr]

I believe I have narrowed the issue down to the NFS mounts I use and/or the network problem I fixed earlier - could be a combo.

[oshunluvr]

Ok, I think I've solved this one. Turned out to be hardware related. My mobo is going on six years old and seems to be slowly dying. The symptoms are: About three months ago my network connection died. I saw right away my switch had gone off line and unplugging one of the desktop NIC's allowed it to come back on. So I figured it had died so I'd just use the one remaining. This time, I was on the network fine for awhile, then it would lag tremendously or drop off. Odd thing was the browser would still work, but Dolphin and Amarok would not. I assumed it was either a mounted filesystem corruption (btrfs) or one of my NFS mounts. I worry about the btrfs because it's still experimental so I checked it first. Then I disconnected the NFS shares and the problem went away. I reviewed my mounts and was still working on the solution when I noticed my laptop was going on-and-off line while hard-wired. I went to my switch and it was flashing on and off. I removed my last desktop NIC from the switch and all went back to normal.

I thought I was stuck with no network until I replaced my desktop, when I had an idea: What if the router could handle whatever the was causing the switch to barf? I figured the router being "smart" and the switch not might make a difference. Luckily, the router and the switch are near enough that no major surgery was required to test this idea. I needed only clip a couple of zip ties and plug in.

Shazam! Both NIC's went into full function mode and the network stayed up. I needed only reset my MTU to normal (switch supports Jumbo Frames, router does not). So I re-configured my port aggregation and am once again re-connected to my server and the 'net. I still think the old mobo is on it's way out, but I'd like to get at least another six months out of her. When I do upgrade, it will be a full architecture change so it'll be pricey.

Thanks, everyone for your ideas and suggestions. :)

[SteveRiley]

When I do upgrade, it will be a full architecture change so it'll be pricey.
Surely you can find an AS/400 on the cheap somewhere on Craigslist. Matter of fact, I know a guy who heats his basement with one.

[GreyGeek]

Surely you can find an AS/400 on the cheap somewhere on Craigslist. Matter of fact, I know a guy who heats his basement with one. ;D


One of my clients on the outskirts of Omaha had an AS400 with two harddrives and two hd controllers. One for working and one for backup. I was doing VB work on one of their truck GPS apps, but that system was used for payroll. I came to the office one day and the place was in an uproar. The working HD had crashed. So had the backup. Turns out that the vendor had sold them a bill of goods about redundancy and reliability. BOTH HD controllers were powered by a single power supply, and THAT is what burned out. That day, Thursday, was the day they would have printed the paychecks. Needless to say, the paychecks didn't get printed. They didn't get printed the next Thursday, either. The power supply replacement didn't work, but the next one did. Then they found out that the crash had corrupted both drives. They had to go back to a quarterly printout and re-enter data to the current time frame to fill in data they couldn't scrape off of the drives. Meanwhile, they typed out paychecks for everyone so folks could pay bills and eat. My work was finished a short time later, but not before I heard that they had sued their vendor. I didn't follow that fiasco so I can't report who won the lawsuit. That was in the mid 1990s. The trucking company is still in business.