Mandriva 2006 slow KDE performance
Somewhere along the line, there was a review up of Mandriva 2006 where the reviewer mentioned extremely slow performance in KDE, but on loading GNome instead, things were just fine. I’ve seen some slow KDE performance on the laptop that I upgraded and thought I’d pass along some of what I’ve done to help the situation. For starters, it’s probably a good time to review the main system services (yes I know it seems to be just KDE, but it never hurts to ask “do I really need to leave the webserver running all the time?”)
Anyway, the Mandriva control center (Configure your computer from the K menu, system, configuration menu) is the place to get at system services (root password required.) Once there, you can choose system, then services to pick and choose what services run at boot no matter what. Obviously that’s just a first place to look.
The next step I took is to look at what KDE services run when KDE loads. K menu, system, configuration, “configure your desktop”. From here select Components, then “service manager” Any of the services in the lower pane of the config window can be stopped or disabled. Some deal with mapping special keyboard keys (like a browser button), others deal with automounting “hotplugged” devices, still others listen for “talk” on the local machine. Talk was an early “chat” protocol. On multi-user systems this was a way for different users at varied terminals to “talk” to each other. KDE has a daemon that loads to listen for those talk requests, but unless you have multiple users logged in at the same time you likely don’t need it.
The next thing I did was a search through the errata and Mandriva club. (and google groups) I found that KAT (kde’s desktop search) could slow KDE down considerably, so I made sure that was not installed. I found this writeup of a Mandriva 2006 install that suggested that RealPlayer 10 (as opposed to RealPlayer 8) was part of KDE’s sluggishness (plugin component causing slowdown?) I don’t know if I noticed a difference, but I did remove that to see.
I’ll leave this open if there are other comments (outside of trolling for another distro or window manager).