Dolphin has become un-usably slow

Help
1

I have Kubuntu 24.04. I’m not sure what’s going on, but over the last few days Dolphin has become un-usably slow. When I click on a folder, try to open a new folder, or switch tabs, it can take 10+ minutes for the folder to load. These are just normal folders that always loaded almost instantly in the past. I emptied the Trash, but it has no effect. I’m not sure where to start troubleshooting this. I checked with :

journalctl -xe

and found this that might be related?

systemd[4047]: Started app-org.kde.dolphin-1f2f78e506df4624b292d3ab8c81d04b.scope - Dolphin - File Manager.
░░ Subject: A start job for unit UNIT has finished successfully
░░ Defined-By: systemd
░░ Support: http://www.ubuntu.com/support
░░ 
░░ A start job for unit UNIT has finished successfully.
░░ 
░░ The job identifier is 1056.
kwin_x11[4372]: kwin_core: XCB error: 152 (BadDamage), sequence: 50620, resource id: 17549281, major code: 143 (DAMAGE), sequence: 50620, resource id: 17549281, major code: 143 (DAMAGE), minor code: 3 (Subtract)

When I run “ls” in Konsole on these same folders the list comes back instantly, so it seems to be something with Dolphin specifically.

What could cause this?

2

The most fundamental idea would be to create a new USER, log in and try there.

For someone with no clue where to start, I created the DumbGuide™ from my own fumbling efforts:

Dumb Guide™ 
# brute force troubleshooting...
mv ~/.config ~/.configBORKED
# logout and log back in again to force plasma to recreate the folder with default settings
dolphin --split ~/.config ~/.configBORKED
# copy back half of the BORKED folder contents at a time and relog to see if issue returns
# if it does, then delete the folder again, relog, and only copy half of that previous half
# repeat until the culprit is found, then finally, copy back everything BUT that culprit bit

dolphin uses a file called ~/.config/dolphinrc - that might be your first target if you go cleaning up the config file…

So instead of the totally dumb guide, start by renaming that file.

3

running the program from a terminal to see what error messages are produced is usually the first troubleshooting action to take.

what do you get if you run dolphin from a terminal?

1 Like