Version:            (using KDE KDE 3.3.2)
Installed from:    Debian testing/unstable Packages
Compiler:          gcc version 3.3.5 (Debian 1:3.3.5-8) 
OS:                Linux

It takes very long time to display the dialog box after selecting the "Configure Desktop" option from the desktop's context menu: more than 2 minutes (2.4Ghz pentium 4).

I have 12 desktops and most of them use "slide show" on background.  The problem is I have quite a large number of images configured to be used with the slide show background: over 47000 jpegs in several directories.  strace output (from kcmshell and kdesktop) shows a lot of access() and stat64() calls for every file in those directories.

It seems the "Configure Desktop" option causes the following command to be executed:
kcmshell kde-background kde-desktopbehavior kde-desktop kde-screensaver kde-display
So I did some time measurement from the shell prompt:

$ time kcmshell kde-background kde-desktopbehavior kde-desktop kde-screensaver kde-display
real    2m11.218s
user    1m55.333s
sys     0m9.796s

$ time kcmshell kde-background
real    0m11.665s
user    0m6.025s
sys     0m4.642s

As you can see, the kde-background module alone is not so bad (though 11 seconds, it is quite a while...)

Tried also with other modules, e.g.:
$time kcmshell kde-desktop
real    0m0.896s
user    0m0.411s
sys     0m0.069s

but:
$ time kcmshell kde-background kde-desktop
real    2m10.495s
user    1m54.880s
sys     0m9.307s

On the other hand:
$ time kcmshell kde-desktop kde-background
real    0m0.878s
user    0m0.441s
sys     0m0.065s

As above, but clicked on the background icon when the dialog appeared:
$ time kcmshell kde-desktop kde-background
real    0m11.518s
user    0m6.077s
sys     0m4.475s


What's interesting, it seems that the time consumed depends on the order of arguments to kcmshell (11 seconds for 'kcmshell kde-desktop kde-background' compared to over 2 minutes for 'kcmshell kde-background kde-desktop').

The same problem (associated with the large number of wallpaper images) also occurs in kdesktop process, which horribly icreases KDE startup time.


Jacek