Solved KDE compositing briefly locks up occasionally

S

svxs

I've installed a very basic (with most applications disabled) x11-wm/kde4 along with x11/xorg and x11/nvidia-driver for my system (on FreeBSD 10.0-RELEASE-p10).

KDE works excellently except that every few minutes, mouse/keyboard input very briefly hangs or freezes before resuming as if nothing had happened. This only happens when compositing is enabled in kwin (and only happens with x11-wm/kde4; other desktop environments like x11-wm/xfce4 with compositing enabled work fine).

Input is the only thing that freezes. Output continues perfectly; I tested by playing videos with multimedia/mplayer2 and still observed my mouse cursor and typed characters in a terminal window "lag" briefly while video and audio playback continued without any glitches.

I can't find anything in .xsession-errors or /var/log/kdm.log that shows there's a problem. I've also tried changing the "compositing type" between OpenGL 1.2, 2.0, and 3.0 in KDE's "System Settings -> Configure Desktop Effects" menu. The "XRender" type does not seem to hang but I didn't test it very much (less than a minute, since it disables some effects I like).

I'd appreciate any help or ideas that anyone might have! Any clues at all to help solve this would be great.

Edit:

I've also tried keeping compositing enabled, but disabling all of the effects from KDE's "System Settings -> Configure Desktop Effects -> All Effects" menu. It didn't help.
 
I managed to fix it! I'll keep my original post for anyone who happens to be searching for this problem.

The solution was to deinstall graphics/dri and graphics/libGL and then to reinstall them both. I have no idea why, but it worked. KDE also seems much more responsive in general with compositing enabled after doing that.
 
I thought I had this fixed (and I swear it was working properly after my above solution) but it seems that the problem is back. There are still occasional input lags just like before, and again it is slightly sluggish. I didn't do anything that should have broken it.

This still only happens in KDE. Openbox and Xfce4 work properly, and a version of games/ezquake that I've modified with patches to handle mouse input better that I run in an X session without any window manager doesn't lag even the slightest.

Does anyone have any ideas at all? I can't replicate this problem under Gentoo Linux.

The only interesting thing at all from the X and KDE log files is this, from /var/log/Xorg.0.log:
Code: 
[  3592.975] [mi] Increasing EQ size to 512 to prevent dropped events.

Please let me know if anyone has any ideas at all to fix these stutters.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top