Version: (using KDE KDE 3.3.2) Installed from: Mandrake RPMs Compiler: gcc (GCC) 3.4.3 (Mandrakelinux 10.2 3.4.3-3mdk) kicker is from kdebase-progs-3.3.2-100.1.102mdk OS: Linux For a year or two I thought that my Maxtor USB 2.0 external disk is deadly slow, close to unusable. The usual copy speed of large files (>1GB) usually drop down to 70Kb/s. I have not realized this before today, but the problem is in kicker or konqueror interaction. Copy on console works much faster, playback as well and moreover when I use renice 15 -p {kicker_pid} everything starts to work fine and I get regular copy speed of 10MB/s. Here is listing from my top, showing that kicker really occupies a lot of CPU. 11911 user 15 0 31600 19m 14m S 46.3 3.8 0:47.27 kicker 10003 root 16 0 96812 35m 2636 R 41.7 7.1 17:51.18 X I have no idea why this happens, but I would compare the result to crash - the computer gets occupied by the kicker, nothing else can be done, everything seems to be broken. Btw. I use kasbar, volume control, clocks, and also I used xmms control and cpu monitor embeded in kicker, but I disabled these two, with no improvement however.
if you remove kasbar, does this help? if so, this may be resolved at least in part with the taskbar lib optimizations i did in 3.4, though kasbar itself may have optimization issues of its own still.
I can confirm that removing kasbar helps. The copy speed stays at 10MB/s. I cannot verify whether 3.4 behaviour is better as I am a bit affraid to upgrade the whole kde to newer version - my wife would give me hard time if something stoped to work. Any easy way to try just the taskbar lib optimization you described with 3.3.2 system?
i don't think there is any easy way to install just the new taskbar lib without touching anything else, sorry =/
Is this still a problem now that progress indication is off by default in kasbar?
Kasbar is no more developed and it will not be ported on KDE4. Kasbar bugs are being closed as "UNMANTAINED". For specific kasbar feature which doesn't exists in the new KDE4 please open a new wish for KDE4. :-) Many thanks.