[Plasma 6.2] Performance and speed severely degraded after upgrading

Help
1

I don’t know what was modified or added to cause this serious problem, I have 3 laptops (cheap/old and medium range) only using Intel iGPUs (two i3 and one dual core), I thought the problem was on only one laptop but after upgrading all of them, the mouse movements became laggy, animations are rendered slowly and the whole experience is really worse and severe on Plasma6.2, even disabling that problematic blur effect didn’t improve the situation.

I really can’t use the system to do anything serious, and truthfully regretted upgrading, Plasma 6.1 was the optimum of what KDE ever produced, everything was fast and the performance was really great.

2

Also having the same problem with one system using llvmpipe.

In about system what does it show as the “Graphics processor”?

3

Each one shows one of:

Mesa Intel® UHD Graphics

Mesa Mobile Intel® GM45 Express Chipset

Mesa Intel® HD Graphics 5500

4

Most probably using Manjaro unstable you downloaded some other package that you shouldn’t, have you thought about that?

5

Manjaro unstable is directly synchronized with Arch stable so nothing wrong is pulled from there.

Plus, even on Arch the problem is present.

6

Not true, it contains also Manjaro packages, Manjaro package rebuilds on their own, and sometimes servers are not synced leading to missing packages.

7

No, I run for years Manjaro and Arch, so I know what I report.

8

Well, I’m sorry for being quick to complain.

After launching that tool “Plasma Renderer” (search it via Kickoff Launcher) then selecting “Software” as “Rendering Backend” and rebooting, then reset it to “Automatic” and rebooting again, I was happy :tada: to recover the same speed and performance as they were in Plasma 6.1.

Edit:
Sadly the slowness reappears again after rebooting several times.

Was there any new effect added or heavily modified to/in Plasma 6.2?

9

I’m experiencing the same issue on Arch with a 6th generation Intel CPU. The Plasma desktop feels sluggish, especially when moving icons. When I use a busy or colorful wallpaper with many elements, KWin becomes laggy and slow, but it performs well with simple, solid wallpapers. I’ve tried different themes like Klassy, Breeze, and the old Plastik theme, but none of them improved the speed. Plasma 6.1 was much faster. My setup includes an Intel(R) Core™ i5-6500 CPU (4 cores) running at 3.60 GHz and an integrated Intel HD Graphics 530 GPU at 1.05 GHz.

10

After testing disabling/enabling some settings and rebooting several times with different laptops, it seems that disabling all desktop effects and setting animation speed to instant is the only persistent solution that improves speed and responsiveness of the system.

11

I was looking at the changelog

and saw

  • Core/renderloop: only delay scheduling repaints while vrr is active, don’t entirely drop them. Commit. Fixes bug #493940

It seems like with that fix if the gpu (sw renderer in my case) is too slow for the animations it will always be backlogged since it no longer drops the frames.

Is there any way to disable that?

12

I didn’t use X11 since a long period of time, but I’m amazed how fast and smooth it performs with 6.2, even with all effects enabled it has excellent responsiveness.

For now, I reverted to use X11 for daily usage until Wayland is fixed.

13

Same slow performance on Arch, slight improvement after disabling Shake Cursor, I still already had to switch to x11 for work.

14

OMG, Night Light is the culprit! I disabled it and rebooted and Wayland became usable again.

Can anyone confirm if disabling it also improves Wayland session?

1 Like
15

I can try, How do you disable it?

17

Screenshot_20241015_013850
Screenshot_20241015_0138501366×736 90.9 KB

18

It was already set to Always off on mine :confused:

19

I am not seeing these things.
My system info for the inquisitive

inxi -F
System:
  Host: henry-vivobookasuslaptopx515eax515ea Kernel: 6.11.2-4-MANJARO
    arch: x86_64 bits: 64
  Desktop: KDE Plasma v: 6.2.0 Distro: Manjaro Linux
Machine:
  Type: Laptop System: ASUSTeK product: VivoBook_ASUSLaptop X515EA_X515EA
    v: 1.0 serial: <superuser required>
  Mobo: ASUSTeK model: X515EA v: 1.0 serial: <superuser required>
    UEFI: American Megatrends LLC. v: X515EA.309 date: 05/16/2022
Battery:
  ID-1: BAT0 charge: 28.0 Wh (80.0%) condition: 35.0/37.1 Wh (94.4%)
    volts: 7.8 min: 7.8
CPU:
  Info: quad core model: 11th Gen Intel Core i5-1135G7 bits: 64 type: MT MCP
    cache: L2: 5 MiB
  Speed (MHz): avg: 1033 min/max: 400/4200 cores: 1: 1033 2: 1033 3: 1033
    4: 1033 5: 1033 6: 1033 7: 1033 8: 1033
Graphics:
  Device-1: Intel TigerLake-LP GT2 [Iris Xe Graphics] driver: i915 v: kernel
  Device-2: Sonix USB2.0 HD UVC WebCam driver: uvcvideo type: USB
  Display: wayland server: X.org v: 1.21.1.13 with: Xwayland v: 24.1.2
    compositor: kwin_wayland driver: X: loaded: modesetting dri: iris gpu: i915
    resolution: 1600x900
  API: EGL v: 1.5 drivers: iris,swrast
    platforms: gbm,wayland,x11,surfaceless,device
  API: OpenGL v: 4.6 compat-v: 4.5 vendor: intel mesa v: 24.2.4-arch1.1
    renderer: Mesa Intel Xe Graphics (TGL GT2)
  API: Vulkan v: 1.3.295 drivers: intel surfaces: xcb,xlib,wayland
Audio:
  Device-1: Intel Tiger Lake-LP Smart Sound Audio driver: snd_hda_intel
  API: ALSA v: k6.11.2-4-MANJARO status: kernel-api
  Server-1: PipeWire v: 1.2.5 status: active
Network:
  Device-1: Intel Wi-Fi 6E AX210/AX1675 2x2 [Typhoon Peak] driver: iwlwifi
  IF: wlo1 state: up mac: c4:03:a8:86:cc:16
Bluetooth:
  Device-1: Intel AX210 Bluetooth driver: btusb type: USB
  Report: rfkill ID: hci0 state: up address: see --recommends
RAID:
  Hardware-1: Intel Volume Management Device NVMe RAID Controller driver: vmd
Drives:
  Local Storage: total: 931.51 GiB used: 93.62 GiB (10.1%)
  ID-1: /dev/nvme0n1 vendor: Crucial model: CT1000T500SSD8 size: 931.51 GiB
Partition:
  ID-1: / size: 906.86 GiB used: 93.62 GiB (10.3%) fs: ext4
    dev: /dev/nvme0n1p2
  ID-2: /boot/efi size: 299.4 MiB used: 288 KiB (0.1%) fs: vfat
    dev: /dev/nvme0n1p1
Swap:
  ID-1: swap-1 type: partition size: 8.8 GiB used: 0 KiB (0.0%)
    dev: /dev/nvme0n1p3
Sensors:
  System Temperatures: cpu: 40.0 C mobo: N/A
  Fan Speeds (rpm): cpu: 2300
Info:
  Memory: total: 16 GiB note: est. available: 15.32 GiB used: 4.4 GiB (28.7%)
  Processes: 247 Uptime: 1h 55m Shell: Bash inxi: 3.3.36

So consider me lucky :smiley:

20

I’ve never used enabled Night Light and there is no performance improvement by disabling it, strangely only when using a USB mouse, everything is fine with the touchpad.

21

I built kwin locally and tried disabling the timer in core/renderloop: only delay scheduling repaints while vrr is active, don't entirely drop them (371879a9) · Commits · Plasma / KWin · GitLab but it didn’t make a difference.