Dear all, I've been setting up a Linux server in a school which serves about 20 workstations. The server is of reasonable speed and has just been upgraded to SATA RAID so shouldn't be an issue. The workstations are generally P4's and not bad either. All run Slackware 12.1 with the server having the new kernel.org release

The server connects to an HP switch at 1gbit and the workstations are at 100mb/s. I've tried NFS v2 & 3 with no difference.

The problem, is I recently upgraded all PC's to KDE 4 and things have really gone tits up. For many PC's the login time is dreadful. When logged on it takes for ever for the k menu to start and Dolphin is just a joke. Sometimes it gives up loading if it takes too long.

My network is serving logon data via YP. KDM is running on the workstations and always comes up promptly. I export a directory /export from the server and this is mounted by rc.local automatically on each machine. This folder has the home directories etc.

KDE3 did not have any performance issues. I tried it with just one PC on the network today (the rest powered off) and the same stalledness occured. Checking on the server, the bandwidth is really low (15kb etc) so I'm not running out. I've varied the nfs.d server count from 5 to 25 and it doesn't make much if any difference.

Is KDE4, with it's many separate widgets, is it creating a massive amount of tiny transactions to the home directory upon startup?

Is there anything else I should try? My exports are mounted with default parameters.

If I can't get it working it's back to KDE 3.5.10!

Cheers,

Andrew C.