Running with the brakes on ...

[Paul Michael Reilly]

During the past few weeks, my Rawhide system (A31p Thinkpad Laptop, 1G
RAM, 2GHz CPU, running KDE desktop) has been running noticably slower
(starts out OK but gets worse over time), particularly with
Thunderbird, Firefox and other GUI tools but not so with Emacs, FWIW.
I've been scratching my head trying to figure out how to characterize
the slowdown in order to say something useful and file a bug report if
appropriate but until now about all I could say was "... boy this
system seems slower ... maybe if I do an update it will cure whatever
ails it ..." only to find out that no magic bullet was available from
yum yet.  But a few minutes ago, I started playing with multiple X
sessions via the "Switch User" facility.  I created a root session on
Ctrl-Alt-F8 running Gnome.  Then I set about to enable sound to run
for multiple Users running both KDE and Gnome to run the Soundcard
Detection tool and configuring /etc/profile to set the permissions for
multiple simultaneous sound car users.  I discovered, much to my
surprise that the F8 (GNOME) session works perfectly normally while
the F7 session (KDE).  Which is not to suggest that I think this is a
desktop selection issue by any stretch.  Now I think I have enough
information to solicit suggestions that are more meaningful than the
terse

"man oprofile"

suggestion that I received a few days ago towards getting to the root
of the issue.  Even better, it would be good to know if anyone else
running a remotely similar environment (rawhide, KDE, thunderbird,
firefox) is experiencing similar performance slowdowns with the GUI
tools.

When running top, I see that X is consuming 40% of memory which is not
surprising since I am running two X sessions with 3200x1200 (dual
head, radeon, open source) along with long running firefox,
thunderbird and VNC (also 3200x1200) apps).  But when I bring up the
Soundcard Detection tool under KDE top shows Xorg is consistently
grabbing 93% of the CPU even when all I am doing is typing this
message.  That would certainly explain a lot of the lag in response to
mouse clicks from the app. :-)  Switching to Gnome and running top
there shows varying, but high (60%ish) CPU use with the Soundcard
Detection tool still running in both sessions.  But with Gnome,
response to mousee clicks is fine, even with the high X CPU use.

So I'm still scratching my head but something about the KDE
environment is causing a performance problem for my system.

-pmr