Instability, I suspect gwenview is the culprit

[Rob_B]

Laptop specs are here.

I've been through Kubuntu, and now openSuse 11. I'm encountering the same problem now with openSuse. I'm running KDE4.

Here's the situation. My wife is using the laptop to look through wedding pictures (about 3.8Gb on the hdd) to put an album together. She's using gwenview to browse them, and after about ten minutes the laptop slows to the point that it is literally unusable. The mouse cursor moves, but that's about it. I end up having to do a hard reset. She's getting angry and wants XP back.

I've tried F-spot, but I couldn't seem to get it to organize the photos by filename, which is what I need. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

[bigtomrodney]

It sounds like a problem with X. What video driver are you using? Run this in a terminal if you are unsure

grep -i driver /etc/X11/xorg.conf

Do you know what video card you have?

[Rob_B]

ATI Radeon 9550, if memory serves right. The laptop is at home, and I'm at work, but I'll post the output of that command when I get home.

[IsaacKuo]

Why does it sound like a problem with X? That's the last thing I'd suspect.

My first suspicion is that it's related to KDE4. KDE4 isn't ready for prime time, yet. Or maybe it's just the version of gwenview involved. I don't use gwenview much, so I'm not familiar with tweaking it. If there's an option to turn OFF caching of thumbnails, that would be the first thing I'd try.

I use GQView, which is much faster and more responsive than gwenview. With GQView, I turn off caching of thumbnails, since to me it's just a waste of time and resources. I use GQView to browse around about 20gigs of photos, with no problem.

But overall, I think the basic problem is likely that KDE4 simply isn't ready yet.

[i92guboj]

The fact that the performance degrades with time suggest that, probably, your ram is filling, and then it starts to swap to disk (which can kill even the most powerful machine).

So, basically, use stable software as IsaacKuo already said. I wouldn't be surprised that kde4 and the new gwenview for kde4 are still leaking ram like mad. Bugs will be solved with time, but kde4 is not stable yet.

Still, you can use top or htop to watch over the ram usage of every application, so you can find which one is leaking ram like mad.