Q I have just installed Free Mandriva Linux 2006. Every time I boot the machine, within a couple of minutes everything slows right down and it becomes difficult to use. I have GKrellM installed and this shows the CPU working flat out. Checking with top shows the culprit is kded. If I kill this, the problem is solved. What does this daemon do, and can I permanently disable it?
A Do you have the search tool Kat installed? If so, this is probably the real CPU hog. Kat calls kded when working, but although kded shows up in top, the problem is called by Kat, which is notorious for its ability to bring the most powerful of machines down to ZX81 levels of performance, although later versions are reported to be rather less demanding. Kded is a generic service daemon run by KDE. It handles updates to KDE's Sycoca database, which holds application information. This is probably the part that is sucking up all your CPU cycles. The most extreme solution is to remove Kat, but you can kill the program with
killall kat killall katdaemon killall kded
The first two lines kill all Kat processes; the third kills kded, which is still trying to process all the requests from Kat. If you check the process list, you'll see that KDE restarts kded, but that it is no longer bogging your system down. You prevent Kat restarting next time you boot with
touch ~/.mdv-no_kat
If you want to re-enable Kat so it starts automatically in future, delete ~/.mdv-no_kat.