Hi all,

I recently had the power supply on my desktop computer die a slow, painful death over the course of a week -- resulting in many abrupt shutdowns. In the course of one of those shutdowns, my .kde file apparently got corrupted.

So after I got a new power supply, I deleted the .kde directory in my home directory and started up KDE again. After a few minutes of setting up KDE for my preferences again, I noticed that KDE seemed a bit faster.

I decided to see about resetting more than just my KDE preferences. First, I always disable the Nepomuk semantic desktop and Strigi indexing. Then, since I don't use Kontact or Kmail, I followed the directions for completely disabling Akonadi.

I always switch from the Kickoff menu style to the classic menu style and I did that again, but I also used to switch to the "classic" desktop (Folder View pointing at my Desktop folder), but this time I used the default Desktop activity setting with only a couple of widgets on my desktop. For some reason, this seems faster than the folder view.

Finally, I decided to get really radical. As root, I moved everything out of my /tmp directory to a possible_trash folder in root's home directory. That operation took for-freaking-ever because the expanded source trees for all my SBo builds were sitting in an SBo subdirectory of /tmp!

In any event, there are a few KDE-related directories that get created in /tmp and there's a possibility that they had accumulated some cruft over the past year or so, although I doubt that this made much of a difference.

In any event, KDE feels a lot snappier now.

Regards,

Thanks for the link about disabling Akonadi - interesting stuff. I have tried removing Akonadi a few times but always ended up breaking something in my ignorance! I'll be studying this today - lots of really good information there - thanks again.

Perhaps the following might help:

Learning KDE4 - Part 2

The FHS says that /tmp is intended for temporary files that are not persistent across reboots or shutdowns. The /var/tmp directory is for persistent temporary files. Many people run cleanup scripts at startup, shutdown or through cron to clean the /tmp directory.

I have used KDE for many years and I agree with your observation. I solved the problem by assigning the $TMP, $TEMP, and $TMPDIR environment variables to tmpfs. KDE automatically uses that tmpfs area for the two user directories normally created in /tmp. As I shut down the system at the end of each day, the tmpfs area is automatically deleted and recreated the next day. No cruft. KDE still uses the /var/tmp location for cache files.

Woodsman:
Every time I go to your web site I learn something.
Thanks!

Thank you!

Agreed! Actually stumbled upon his site not through this site, but by doing some searches on Google. Nice to associate a "face" with the site!

Woodsman,

Your pages have been exceptionally helpful to me over the years. Thank you.

I want to be clear, though, that the few small steps I took and wrote about in my original post were performance changes that were more on the back end than through the UI itself. My computer and video card on my desktop computer have enough horsepower that the geez-wiz geeky effects work very smoothly and quickly. Now they work even quicker.

My Pentium III laptop, on the other hand, runs KDE 4 without any of the effects due to the performance hit.

What I wonder if whether or not the default desktop activity is really faster than the folder view activity for the desktop.

Regards,