Bug 209786

Summary:	Impossibly slow I/O performance while working with a large (1TB) VFAT volume
Product:	[I don't know] kde	Reporter:	Tamás Németh <nt1277>
Component:	general	Assignee:	David Faure <faure>
Status:	RESOLVED WORKSFORME
Severity:	normal	CC:	adawit, cyberbeat, faure, mgleahy
Priority:	NOR	Keywords:	triaged
Version First Reported In:	unspecified
Target Milestone:	---
Platform:	openSUSE
OS:	Linux
Latest Commit:		Version Fixed In:
Sentry Crash Report:

Description Tamás Németh 2009-10-07 19:06:02 UTC

Version:            (using KDE 4.3.1)
OS:                Linux
Installed from:    SuSE RPMs

I created a partition occupying an 1TB hard disk - connected via USB - entirely and formatted it with VFAT. Just opening this volume in dolphin (but copying large/several hundred gigabytes files onto it especially) made KDE 4.3.1 so slow, that I even have to log out from KDE, because the machine went to almost totally unresponsive. The same filesystem worked much faster in KDE3 as far as I can remember. I addition to this, SMB transfer is much slower in both KDE3 and KDE4 as with bare commandline smbclient (they give about half that speed).

Later I changed the VFAT filesystem to NTFS, and KDE4 become usable, but still slow (copying 380GB data to the disk took more than 24 hours).

Comment 1 H.H. 2010-05-03 18:55:44 UTC

I can reproduce this freeze problem with big external vfat partitions on mount with kde-4.4.2

Comment 2 mgleahy 2011-05-20 18:21:43 UTC

I have this same problem, but with an NTFS filesystem on a 16GB USB device.

This issue is present for me with 10.10, using KDE 4.6.2 and dolphin 1.6.1.  It was also an issue for me with earlier versions of KDE (I first noticed the problem when I acquired this device in January).

If I copy using Dolphin, it seems to instantaneously copy/cache about 250MB, but after that the copy slows to a crawl, as does most other KDE applications.  If I close all instances of Dolphin, it does speed up a bit, but it's still pretty bad.  This is effectively useless for copying large files (as-in, it can take 30 minutes or so to copy about 1.5gb of data).

If I just use 'cp' in the commandline to copy the files, it goes much faster (somewhere around 60 seconds for the 1.5gb of same data), and the desktop doesn't get locked up.  I wonder if maybe KDE is doing too much to monitor the contents of the drive at all times, causing constant I/O wait when something is writing to the drive.

Comment 3 mgleahy 2011-05-20 18:22:48 UTC

Sorry - that 10.10 was meant to refer to Kubuntu 10.10.

Comment 4 Dawit Alemayehu 2013-06-23 12:53:14 UTC

Is this still an issue in KDE 4.10?

Comment 5 Dawit Alemayehu 2013-06-23 13:11:07 UTC

see comment #4.

Comment 6 Andrew Crouthamel 2018-09-24 02:22:37 UTC

Dear Bug Submitter,

This bug has been in NEEDSINFO status with no change for at least 15 days. Please provide the requested information as soon as possible and set the bug status as REPORTED. Due to regular bug tracker maintenance, if the bug is still in NEEDSINFO status with no change in 30 days, the bug will be closed as RESOLVED > WORKSFORME due to lack of needed information.

For more information about our bug triaging procedures please read the wiki located here: https://community.kde.org/Guidelines_and_HOWTOs/Bug_triaging

If you have already provided the requested information, please set the bug status as REPORTED so that the KDE team knows that the bug is ready to be confirmed.

Thank you for helping us make KDE software even better for everyone!

Comment 7 Andrew Crouthamel 2018-10-27 03:57:11 UTC

Dear Bug Submitter,

This bug has been in NEEDSINFO status with no change for at least 30 days. The bug is now closed as RESOLVED > WORKSFORME due to lack of needed information.

For more information about our bug triaging procedures please read the wiki located here: https://community.kde.org/Guidelines_and_HOWTOs/Bug_triaging

Thank you for helping us make KDE software even better for everyone!