Hello everyone,
I'm switching to Mageia 6 x64 with a clean install but leaving Mageia 5 x64 on a separate drive. In Mageia 5 I've been having a problem with Dolphin's right click menu being slow. This is a KDE/Homerun issue, not Mageia specific. After some investigation I found that Dolphin was spiking a single CPU core to 100% and doing 5MB/s I/O according to KSysguard. I looked everywhere and turned off Dolphin's services and removed my custom service menus etc. Nothing made a difference.
I finally figured it out today. There was a bug in Homerun that caused Dolphin to show duplicate entries in Places which was supposed to have been patched. I've been using Homerun Kicker for my menu and apparently it's still generating duplicates, just not displaying them. My bookmarks.xml file in ~/.kde4/share/apps/kfileplaces/ was 184,171 lines long! Yes, near 200,000 lines long and 4.6MBs in size. That's what was causing the 7 second delay on my right click context menu. This only happened when right clicking on the white space (not on a file) or on a folder in Dolphin. The menu came up quickly but you couldn't select anything for 7 seconds.
If you just delete bookmarks.xml and bookmarks.xml.bak they'll be replaced pretty quickly. You have to logout and delete them from a console to get rid of them. You must uninstall Homerun Kicker first. After more investigation I found that my machine was displaying the duplicate Places entries too. I don't know exactly how it works but after uninstalling Homerun Kicker and deleting the bookmark xml files, it worked great until I reinstalled Homerun Kicker. It immediately started generating duplicate entries in Places and I immediately removed Kicker and the xml files again. That's it, I'm done with it.
Before I uninstalled Kicker I couldn't see that it was making duplicate entries except I had a growing bookmark file that was causing my right click context menu to be super slow. I don't know what gets changed by uninstalling and reinstalling Kicker but whatever it is, it causes the duplicates to be visible in Dolphin. I hope this helps some of you who are going to keep using Mageia 5 or even those of you using other distros. I have a lot of unknowns with this issue but I do know this is how you fix 100% CPU spikes and a slow menu when you right click.
I haven't investigated this issue in Mageia 6 but I'm going to very soon and I'll post what I find. The duplicate Places entries was supposed to be fixed but there are still issues within Magiea 5. I checked the program versions and mine are supposed to be patched to fix these issues. I'm using Homerun Kicker 1.2.5 and Dolphin 4.14.3 in KDE 4.14.35. I've installed and used Homerun Kicker since before it was packaged with KDE and I really like it, but I had to switch to Kickoff. I will post anything I find or read or learn etc.