KDE System Settings menu sometimes very laggy

[anon53399124]

Something I've noticed in KDE, mainly when using the System Settings menu:

Sometimes (about 40% of the time), menus will be very laggy, while the rest of the time they are virtually instantaneous. And it's not totally random - it will go through periods of being consistently laggy and then consistently fast.

For example, when changing a setting in one of the System Settings menu tabs, and then changing to a different tab without saving the changes, sometimes the dialog box that asks whether you want to discard your changes or not will be extremely slow to appear i.e. take 3-4 seconds, while the rest of the time it's virtually instant.

Has anyone else noticed this / able to reproduce it / have a fix for it?

[jsamyth]

How much memory do you have in your machine?
Does it have a swap enables?

If I've ever had the "want to discard" message up, it seems to remain in memory, and is fast from then on, but when I have a lot of stuff going on and high memory use, it can take a while. Never as much as 4 seconds.

[anon53399124]

I've got 8GB RAM with a 2GB swap file, with swappiness set to 10.

Your description sounds similar to my experience.

Perhaps it is just something to do with Linux unloading memory in a weird way?

[jsamyth]

I've got about the same, but I have a Virtual Machine in the background.

[c00ter]

KDE uses its own system and application caching. The whole thing can seem a bit laggy after a cold boot, when nothing has been cached.

But this is Linux--we don't care much about booting and rebooting, we care about using. And the more you use KDE, the faster processes will complete.

At least that has been my experience with it. I also do not have hardware managers, kernel managers, or update managers resident or running.

Regards

[mbb]

I find this strange, as I never noticed such a lag. What compositor do you have set in the screen/monitor settings (XRender/OpenGL)? Also, do you notice a lot of disk activity when the lag happens?