Hi, I too noticed this as a truly major performance issue on my desktop and can see how this is a problem on a laptop so I took the issue to the kde-devel mailing list.
Unfortunately it seems that some KDE developers think fsync()ing data to disk every now and then 1. is not a major performance issue, and 2. is actually good practice. (I haven't given up hope yet they can be persuaded this is Wrong.) Basically, nearly all fsync()s KDE does can be disabled by replacing "result = FDATASYNC(mFd)" in kdelibs-3.5.9/kdecore/ktempfile.cpp by "result = 0". This is a hack, but the only piece in KDE I have figured out so far actually should need fsync() for anything is KShred (trying to securely wipe files). As the fsync() system call is explicitly allowed to be a nop (and is so for NFS on Linux I think, on some BSDs it's not), this should not break anything unless your system crashes or you lose power suddenly. Even then it's a risk pretty much every software takes, and I think KDE shouldn't force synchronous file access down my throat. Anyway, I did the change I mentioned above, and the difference in speed is truly amazing. KDE starts in a few tenths of a second, Konqueror no longer makes me wait for seconds with medium disk loads, etc. According to one bug report and followup discussion, KMail even goes as far as to issue sync() system calls to sync _all dirty kernel buffers_, no matter whose, to disk[1], which is evil and broken behavior enough to make me want to rm the kmail binary :). It should be obvious this totally ruins the performance for any multiuser setup. Here's the most recent thread I initiated: http://lists.kde.org/?l=kde-devel&m=120861637525158&w=2 and here are some older threads/mails discussing the issue: http://lists.kde.org/?l=kde-core-devel&m=97502254108121&w=2 http://lists.kde.org/?l=kde-core-devel&m=108987991924336&w=2 http://lists.kde.org/?l=kde-devel&m=119255926531628&w=2 http://lists.kde.org/?l=kde-core-devel&m=108971672603299&w=2 Some KDE bugs related to the issue: http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=110318 http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=142462 http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=90042 http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=146789 Sami [1] http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=90042
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