Hello,

I'm running KDE on Debian Lenny on an IBM T42. Occasionally (about once a day) when I try to start a program I get the little bouncy icon saying it's starting for about 30 seconds, after which the icon disappears, but the program doesn't start. After about three minutes, when I've given up and forgotten about it, the program window suddenly appears. This happens most often with kwrite, but has also happened with various open office programs. It has happened when I started a program by typing its name into the Run Command box, or by selecting it from a menu, or typing it into the command line.

Using ps -ef during the delay, I get:

lydia 7594 3184 0 09:52 ? 00:00:00 kwrite
root 8164 1316 0 09:54 ? 00:00:00 sleep 1
root 8167 1644 0 09:54 ? 00:00:00 sleep 1
lydia 8168 8147 0 09:54 pts/1 00:00:00 ps -ef

After killing the root sleep programs, I get:

lydia 7594 3184 0 09:52 ? 00:00:00 kwrite todo.txt
root 11441 1644 0 10:03 ? 00:00:00 sleep 1
root 11444 1316 0 10:03 ? 00:00:00 sleep 1
lydia 11445 8147 0 10:03 pts/1 00:00:00 ps -ef

This isn't a terribly debilitating problem, but it gets annoying when I want to jot some notes and have to wait three minutes for the program to start. This also happened to me when I was running Debian Etch.

Thanks for your help,

Lydia

If you suspect these sleep commands are related to problem, I would suggest tracing the ancestry of the commands back to whatever is causing them. You might (if you haven't already) want to redirect the output of ps to a file. The third column is the PID of that process's parent. So for your first output you might look and see what processes 1316 and 1644 are. And then see what the parent of those processes are, etc. You might find that the sleep processes have nothing to do with your problem. Or, it might give you another piece or two to the puzzle.

EDIT: I would suspect that sleep 1 commands are called from a script that is waiting for something to happen and polling once a second. Using sleep commands prevents such a script from needlessly using up all the CPU time while it waits.