https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=463647
Bug ID: 463647
Summary: Slow start on network mounts because of image icon
lookups + may broken UI
Classification: Applications
Product: okular
Version: 22.08.3
Platform: Ubuntu
OS: Linux
Status: REPORTED
Severity: normal
Priority: NOR
Component: general
Assignee: okular-devel@kde.org
Reporter: mi.sel...@hotmail.de
Target Milestone: ---
Created attachment 154918
--> https://bugs.kde.org/attachment.cgi?id=154918&action=edit
wrong icons in UI
SUMMARY
Preamble:
I'm using okular to view PDF files which are on a samba network storage. The
storage is mounted via CIFS to the local filesystem. I'm discovered that
sometimes it will take several seconds (20 or more) to open and view small PDF
files.
The waiting time increases when I'm connected via VPN (OpenVpn, Wireguard, ...,
doesn't matter) and it will take more than a minute to display these files.
After that I was looking for some bug reports and found some old ones with
okular and CIFS, but they are solved or 9 years without a message. So after
some weeks I started testing again.
- (Windows 10+11 shows the PDF files nearly instantly.)
- Copying the file to the local storage and opening files there is way faster,
than opening okular in the mounted storage path.
- Evince on this machine also shows the files instantly.
-> so the network connection and CIFS are working fine
- Then I discovered, that PDF files on the CIFS mount path will open faster
when there are no sub-directories.
- The other way around: opening files in multiple subdirectores paths will
cause long waiting times in okular.
- Then I discovered that the same thing is happening when no file is selected
at all and okular was simply started on a CIFS mount path: long sub-path ->
long starting time for okular
-> My thought: okular is looking for files in the current directory, may in the
whole path.
-> So I used some tools to track the accessed files of an okular program start.
The problem:
The annotation widget module of okular is looking for icon images in the
current working directory when they are not included in the stamp.svg or loaded
via the theme.
On each start of okular, okular will look for some images with a set list of
image extensions in the current working directory, when the icon/image name was
not previously cached via an id in some SVG file or was loaded as icon via the
theme.
e.g.
- there is no id 'bookmark-new' in the stamp.svg or the icon theme
-> okular will look for 'bookmark-new', 'bookmark-new.3fr', ... [long list]
..., 'bookmark-new.png', ... [...].tiff, ...svg, ...
in the current working directory. There are 66 lookups for this filename. This
happens on each start - for each okular instance.
-> the same goes for
--> 'help-about', 'kde', 'okular' (see
https://github.com/KDE/okular/blob/master/part/annotationwidgets.cpp#L430)
-> if you open the annotation settings there will be lookups for more files.
see the list in
https://github.com/KDE/okular/blob/master/part/annotationwidgets.cpp#L366
-> These icon file lookups will happen when the class PixmapPreviewSelector
will load some icons files. Each time an instance is created and icon names
added.
-> Massive slow down on 'slow' data storage drives / mount points.
-> If there are files with this names, this will break the UI (See attachment).
STEPS TO REPRODUCE
As it is way simpler to recreate and test a broken UI, as to setup some 'slow,
cifs mounted, long sub path PDF files' -> I will go with this, as it is the
same bug. But there are more steps.
File Lookup:
1. create / download some small png file, and copy+rename it to 'okular.png',
'kde.png', 'help-about.png', 'Note.png', 'NewParagraph.png', 'Paragraph.png',
'Insert.png', 'Help.png', 'Key.png', 'Comment.png'
2. open up a terminal/console, change the directory to the one containing the
files from step 1
3. start okular from the terminal/console in this path
> this will load access some of the files
> you can check this e.g. with 'strace' or use she tool from the answer of this
> question:
> https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/18844/list-the-files-accessed-by-a-program
>> command: tracefile okular | grep -E '\.\/'
Broken UI: (see attachment)
4. open a PDF file
5. may enable/show annotation tools
6. open stamp list
To recreate the slow okular program start follow this procedure:
1. mount some samba net storage with CIFS
> mkdir /smb_cifs_mountpoint
> mount -t cifs -o username=,uid=$(id -u),gid=$(id -g)
> ///share "/smb_cifs_mountpoint"
2. create long path:
> mkdir -p /smb_cifs_mountpoint/a/b/c/d/e/f/g/h/i
3. change directory:
> cd /smb_cifs_mountpoint/a/b/c/d/e/f/g/h/i
4. start okular:
> okular
OBSERVED RESULT
- on CIFS mount: long waiting time to view/open a PDF file
- broken UI (wrong icons) when file names exist on current path
EXPECTED RESULT
