KDE Plasma Shell Tries to open thousands of files on startup and crashes

Help
1

I was helping my friend organize her photos by year. (They were all on a single folder in an external hard drive, and I was putting them into folders organized by month and year.) I was doing this via Dolphin because it was less effort in my mind. However, while I was transferring a particularly large group of files into ‘2023’ my system froze up. I waited for a bit, but after about 2 or three minutes, I figured that was it, so I force-shutdown the computer and hoped for the best.

When I booted back up the computer ran fine for about 15 seconds and then froze again. I continued this multiple times to try and figure out what was wrong. I tried using ‘free’ in Konsole and saw that memory was very high. ‘watch free’ showed that upon startup RAM usage went from 2GB to 15GB in about 10 seconds. The last little bytes were eaten up and the system froze and crashed again.

I then used top in Konsole to find that it was Plasmashell that was taking all the RAM. journalctl -b /usr/bin/plasmashell told me that every time the shell started it would try to open files in the now removed drive. I’m talking thousands of photos. I can only assume that this is what killed the system. However, I don’t know how to get it to stop opening these photos. Can anyone tell me what file I need to reconfigure or edit in order to stop this.

This is the output on journalctl there are thousands of lines of this:
Apr 24 14:17:39 fedora plasmashell[2997]: kf.coreaddons: Failed to open "/run/media/SHBR/I> Apr 24 14:17:39 fedora plasmashell[2997]: kf.coreaddons: Failed to open "/run/media/SHBR/I> Apr 24 14:17:39 fedora plasmashell[2997]: kf.coreaddons: Failed to open "/run/media/SHBR/I> Apr 24 14:17:39 fedora plasmashell[2997]: kf.coreaddons: Failed to open "/run/media/SHBR/I> Apr 24 14:17:39 fedora plasmashell[2997]: kf.coreaddons: Failed to open "/run/media/SHBR/I> Apr 24 14:17:39 fedora plasmashell[2997]: kf.coreaddons: Failed to open "/run/media/SHBR/I> Apr 24 14:17:39 fedora plasmashell[2997]: kf.coreaddons: Failed to open "/run/media/SHBR/I> Apr 24 14:17:39 fedora plasmashell[2997]: kf.coreaddons: Failed to open "/run/media/SHBR/I>

Edit: I realized I should clarify, I’m using Fedora 39 and KDE Plasma 5.27.11-1.fc39

2

In System Settings - Session Restore, there is an option: Start with an empty session. Select it, that may fix your problem.

1 Like
3

I ended up just deleting all of the .config, .cache, and .local files related to KDE, QT, and Dolphin from a live USB. It was inconvenient, to have to reconfigure my desktop, but at least my computer works again.

Thanks for your help anyway. Hopefully, someone else finds this useful in the future.

I’m sure that it could have been done, without deleting everything, but after spending a few hours on it. I just got frustrated and wanted to make sure it works.

4

If you restore your session this can happen, otherwise just rename .config and reboot to start troubleshooting.