KDE 3.1 suddenly slow (boot and opening programs)
 

I am running suse 9.0 with KDE 3.1

A few days ago I was customizing how KDE looked, installing styles and themes, and trying to see if I could get GTK applications to look better too. I installed the GTK control panel from the Suse (Yast) installer application. I don't know if this messed anything up but now KDE is running very slow, though applications themselves don't seem to be affected.

When I boot my computer it boots fine up to the graphical login. I login, either as root or a user, and it goes fine for a little bit, untill it gets to the second or third icon flashing, then the icon seems to stop, the flashing slows down to about 1/8 the speed as the others, and from then on everything takes a really long time. Eventually It goes past the "restoring Session" but my desktop still is not usable and I have to wait another 10 or 20 seconds before all the icons on the panel are back,before applications I didn't close before logging out are back up and running, and then finally I can click on something in the interface.

When I run a program, as its loading for about 5 to 10 seconds, its as if the interface stops responding. I can move the mouse, but clicking on a window dose not activate it and I just have to wait for the application to load. This is a big change from last week, when I could chat on IRC while I waited for Mozilla to open.

I am fairly new to linux so I am not really sure how to trouble shoot this, anyone have any suggestions?

Sounds as if theres a process that is running and has got stuck in a loop and just using up cpu time.

In a terminal run top to see what process is takeing up all the cpu time. From there it should be fairly obvious which program is causeing the system to slow down.

It is possible that several programs are attempting to execute the commands given by you or the X-server itself. I would do a ps and see what programs are running. Check if there are conflicting or redundent programs running or conflicting packeges installed. Hope it helped.

Today I found out the cause of this problem.

I have installed a Wacom tablet, but I usually don't use it so I don't turn it on (especially since it does not work well for me with 2 monitors under Linux)

Since this tablet dose not work for me very well I will probably just take out the lines I put in my X11 config file, though if anyone has any idea how to make KDE and X run fine whether this is turned on or not, that would be helpful.

Glad you found it.