Title: Why the KDE menu is slow when /usr/ is NFS mounted - and how to fix it
Tags: english, debian edu
-Date: 2012-04-06 22:10
+Date: 2012-04-06 22:20
-<p>Recently I have worked on speeding up a Skolelinux installation
-using LTSP diskless workstations, and in the process I discovered
-something very surprising. The reason the KDE menu is responding slow
-when using it for the first time, is due to the way KDE find
-application icons. I discovered that showing the Multimedia menu
-would cause more than 20 000 IP packages to be passed between the LTSP
-client and the NFS server. Most of these were NFS LOOKUP calls,
+<p>Recently I have worked on speeding up a
+<a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu / Skolelinux</a>
+installation using LTSP diskless workstations, and in the process I
+discovered something very surprising. The reason the KDE menu is
+responding slow when using it for the first time, is due to the way
+KDE find application icons. I discovered that showing the Multimedia
+menu would cause more than 20 000 IP packages to be passed between the
+LTSP client and the NFS server. Most of these were NFS LOOKUP calls,
resulting in a NFS3ERR_NOENT response. Looking at the strace of
kicker in Lenny (or plasma-desktop i Squeeze - same problem there), I
see that the source of these NFS calls are access() system calls. KDE
and .xpm. The result is a very slow KDE menu when /usr/ is NFS
mounted, as showing a single sub menu result in thousands of NFS
requests. I am not the first one to discover this. I found a
-<ahref="https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=211416">KDE bug report
+<a href="https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=211416">KDE bug report
from 2009</a> about this problem, and it is still unsolved.</p>
<p>My solution to speed up the KDE menu was to create a package
<p>The bug report mention that this do not only affect the KDE menu
and icon handling, but also the login process. Not quite sure how to
-speed up that part.</p>
+speed up that part without replacing NFS with for example NBD, and
+that is not really an option at the moment.</p>
-<p>If you got feedback on this issue, please contact debian-edu (at)
-lists.debian.org.</p>
+<p>If you got feedback on this issue, please let us know on debian-edu
+(at) lists.debian.org.</p>