this post was submitted on 12 Sep 2024
22 points (95.8% liked)

KDE

5389 readers
257 users here now

KDE is an international technology team creating user-friendly free and open source software for desktop and portable computing. KDE’s software runs on GNU/Linux, BSD and other operating systems, including Windows.

Plasma 6 Bugs

If you encounter a bug, proceed to https://bugs.kde.org, check whether it has been reported.

If it hasn't, report it yourself.

PLEASE THINK CAREFULLY BEFORE POSTING HERE.

Developers do not look for reports on social media, so they will not see it and all it does is clutter up the feed.

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

I have a few dodgy cheap SSDs, so I'm not surprised by slow I/O performance in general. But my Plasma desktop frequently freezes for 1-3 seconds (including the cursor!) whenever there is high IO load, for example while installing a Steam game.

Updating the screen should be completely independent from I/O, shouldn't it? Is there anything I could've misconfigured in my Arch Linux? I'm running Plasma 6.1.4 in Wayland.

top 10 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I had something similar when my drive started to fail.

At first, it was annoying, because the cursor froze all the time, just like yours, then programs started to do the same, then they started to crash without reason, and in the end, even my unbreakable OS (Fedora Atomic) broke randomy and incoherently.

What did I learn? Don't cheap out on drives, and keep enough backups.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Yeah, I'd be checking the smart stats on my drives and doing a full data backup if I didn't already have one.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago (1 children)

The SMART didn't help. It showed full health and no errors.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago

While that's encouraging, I would still make a full backup of my data and have a plan to replace the drive while I investigated further.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 months ago

Chiming in to say that I've also experienced this on systems with an unresponsive NFS mount, although in that case it hangs until the connection is restored or the network operation times out.

[–] mrvictory1 4 points 2 months ago

Switch to zen kernel, use preempt=full kernel parameter.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago

Years ago I had a similar problem that was resolved by changing the method of I/O scheduling.

https://www.techrepublic.com/article/how-to-change-the-linux-io-scheduler-to-fit-your-needs/

I'm not sure which one I used or if this is still relevant with modern Linux but it's something to look into that might help.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago

Happened to me as well, freezing up the whole system, especially with many/large files. None of the suggestions I found online actually worked. Happened on USB drives as well.

Then my whole HD gave up completely. Replaced it and all problems are gone. USB drives as well: turns out Linux at least tries to read it so you can attempt to save some data, while Windows just says it's unreadable.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago

It might be interesting to determine whether the freezes are limited to Plasma or are happening within the kernel.

  • Have you tried Control+Alt+F1/F2/F3 ... F8, to see if switching virtual consoles still works while the freezes are happening?
  • Do you have another machine on the same network? You could use it to ssh into your desktop machine, and when the freezes are happening, see if they affect ssh interactivity.
[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago

Thank you all for your ideas, I managed to solve the problem. It was somewhat hardware related, but not really.

I was using BTRFS, which creates a lot of write amplification and aged SSDs don't handle that well. According to a study from 2017, btrfs can cause up to 32x write amplification, absolutely hammering its performance: https://ar5iv.labs.arxiv.org/html/1707.08514

I converted my system to RAID0 using EXT4 and the stutters and freezes are gone.