Re: [gentoo-user] KDE plasmashell and wallpapers.

[J. Roeleveld]

On Tuesday, December 24, 2019 10:53:13 AM CET Mick wrote:
> On Tuesday, 24 December 2019 06:40:13 GMT Dale wrote:
> > Howdy,
> >
> > It seems plasmashell and wallpapers for the desktop has a problem.  I'm
> > not sure if it is just me or if it could affect others.  Either way, I
> > have no idea how to fix it.  I have a LOT of wallpapers that I've
> > downloaded/collected over the years.  Some are NASA pics of Mars, stars,
> > galaxies and a whole lot of others that I've accumulated over the last
> > 15 years or so.  According to Dolphin and the properties box, it's well
> > over 100,000 of them.
>
> WOW!  A rather large number I would think.
>
> > I have them all in a directory named, wait for
> > it, wallpapers.  Under that they are sorted in directories by what they
> > are, where they come from or whatever.  I try not to go to deep but it
> > does pick up at least two or three levels deep.  I've had it set that
> > way for ages and it has always worked with the only problem being it
> > picking them at random.  Some are intended to be like a slideshow.
> > Anyway, they added the option of doing them in different orders
> > including a-z, which is nice.  It will be nicer if I can get it to work
> > now.  ;-)
> >
> > Problem.  When I have it set to the main directory and I login to KDE,
> > plasmashell goes nuts.  It hogs up a full CPU core and never stops.
> > It's not exactly memory friendly either.  The little panel thingy at the
> > bottom, the thing with the clock and the pager etc, locks up tight.  The
> > clock doesn't change, you can't select anything with it or anything
> > else.  Just for giggles, I left it for half a hour or so hoping it would
> > finish whatever it was doing but it never did.  Killing plasmashell and
> > restarting results in the same problem.  Once it does that, I have to
> > downgrade to a earlier version of plasma.  While fiddling with it today,
> > I had the idea of manually restarting plasmashell and letting it show on
> > the screen what it was doing.  Since the panel thingy won't work,
> > neither does the clipboard so no copy and paste of the actual error
> > itself.  What it showed me tho was that the wallpapers was the problem.
> > It said something about bad metadata for each and every wallpaper image
> > I have stored.  I can't recall the error exactly but may can reproduce
> > it later.
>
> Take a pic of it so you have a more precise idea what it reports and google
> for ideas on what may be causing it.  If you're on a console use tee to
> redirect the output to a file, or use gpm to select some text off the screen
> and paste it in a file.
>
> > I suspect when the option to have them random or in order was
> > added, something changed in the way it looks at the directory.  Thing
> > is, I have no idea how to make this work like it should with all of them
> > enabled.
>
> I have found the file indexer occasionally chews up CPU non-stop.  I think I
> disabled it at some point but in any case I have not noticed it chewing up
> CPU since.  Could it be the file indexer now needs to re-index all your
> images and it falls over itself due to the number and directory depth?
>
> Is possible to drop into a console or ssh into this PC when it's hanging to
> see what process(es) are taking up resources in real time?
>
> > My temporary solution, I pointed it to a small directory that only has a
> > couple dozen images in it.  That seems to work.
>
> Is there a difference in the metadata of these few images compared with the
> rest in the whole directory?
>
> > Setting it to the whole
> > directory after that tho, does the same as above.  So doing a sort of
> > reset doesn't help.  Heck, at one point, I cleaned up the living room,
> > took out the trash and did some other stuff while it was banging away
> > with a core on my CPU.  Thing never did finish.
> >
> > Anyone even know where to start with this?  I've got it narrowed down to
> > it being a issue with wallpapers.  I just don't know where to go from
> > here.  Is it supposed to do that for some reason and I'm the only one
> > with a HUGE collection?  Surely not.
> >
> > Thanks.
> >
> > Dale
> >
> > :-)  :-)
>
> Some ideas in no particular order:
>
> Compare the metadata of an image which works without crashing and one that
> causes a crash, with exif or less.  If there is no discernible difference it
> may be the problem is not with the metadata, but with Plasma being able to
> parse all these files and their metadata.
>
> Gradually add images to find a number at which the problem occurs and back
> off from there.  Not a solution, but a workaround.
>
> Another workaround, restructure the fs to have fewer layers, but keep the
> same large number of images to see if it process them without a crash.
>
> Do you really all 100,000 images?  Is it worth keeping all of them, or is it
> perhaps time for some house keeping?
>
> Wait for new Plasam version to come out and perhaps report a bug if one is
> not yet posted.

Or run the following:
find ./ -iname "*" -type f -exec file {} \; > /tmp/file.txt

from inside the Wallpaper-folder and check the output (see file /tmp/file.txt) 
for anything obvious.

You will have a long line per file, so using "grep -v " to filter out known 
good results might help in finding the problem file(s)

--
Joost