Would someone who has hardware installed kde4, a network with samba shares, and movie files on the samba share please do a test.
On four separate computers and multiple different machines containing movie files on the network, I am getting a very annoying condition that nobody else has yet mentioned.
If I access a samba share with icons for movies in various formats by using Dolphin the system starts many unintended downloads into the kde4 machine from the open share folder.
To duplicate this, first open a Konquerer window and set it to show icons sorted by date. Also set it to show file size below the icons.
In that konqueror window, open /temp/kde-username.
This is just so that you can see the effect of the problem with dolphin and samba.
Now open dolphin and navigate to a samba share containing movies..preferably 1G to 4G in size so that the effect lasts long enough to see.
I have not checked to see if the display format matters, so be sure to have dolphin showing the contents of the share folder as icons.
Now, just hover the cursor over any movie icon and watch the Konqueror window. Or, if you have a network switch connected to your kde4 machine with lights, watch the lights then the Konqueror window.
If yours behaves as all of my installs behave, whatever file you hover over will start to be downloaded into a temp folder and will be visible in the Konqueror window as the last item showing and with an incrementing file size indication.
It looks as though it is doing a read ahead of the file. The only catch is that once it starts the download, it will not stop until it has downloaded the whole file.
You can tell that it is downloading that particular file by clicking on the icon in the Konqueror window at which time the movie will play.
Now this alone would not be too bad. The thing is that if instead of hovering over the icon, you click on it or drag in order to copy it to your desk top or another folder, it will still start the undesired download to the temp folder and sometimes several at once will start in addition to the intended copy.
Now you have the same file being copied to up to five destinations at the same time which really thrashes the hard drive of the source.
It also loads down the network. While trying to figure out what was happening, I had my 100Mbps network loaded to 87% capacity with unintended transfers.
This is not good. It really ties up the drive on the source machine as well as the drive on the kde4 machine.
Now, if this were not bad enough, just moving the cursor around in the source window will start the same thing happening with several source files while it attempts to make multiple copies of each.
The first noticeable effect of all of this if you are not monitoring with a network switch with lights or with Konqueror watching the temp folder is that an intended file transfer from the source folder that should take 4 minutes will show as needing hours to transfer due to all the undesired activity.
Also, once you get a lot of these transfers going, it continues even if you shut down the Dolphin window that you started it all from.
Needless to say, this makes kde4 have very random response times to everything that you tell it to do just because the local hard drive is so busy writing all these files.
I do not know if this only happens with movie files. I have only tested with them because that is the first place I saw it happening and they are the only files large enough for the condition to build to disastrous levels.
Smaller files just simply finish their temp folder copy before enough other copies start in order to slow the system down too much before any of the copies can finish.
The files I have tested with are various movie files that show as AVI, MPEG, and others that I have forgotten.
I have eliminated almost everything except the backbone of the network itself.
But, in truth, I believe that I have even eliminated that.
I installed the Mepis 8.5 beta3 distribution and it works flawlesly on the same machines accessing the same folders and movies.
By the way, these are all installed copies of PCLOS and Mepis. They are actual hardware installs not virtual installs on VirtualBox.
I even installed the latest test kernel from testing which is the same kernel that Mepis is using. It had no effect.
Please understand that I have tried this on four different machines, two were Intel machines and two were AMD.
While this is an extreme nuisance to me, I can get around it on my own system (I can access everything normally using Konqueror). But, in my efforts to convert family members to PCLOS, it is an absolute show stopper as they all have networks with many stored movies.
