Upgrade isn't likely to help. If KDE is struggling on 6@32, you have something going on that 16@64 is only going to make it last twice as long before choking.

wail till it's slow

Check your Ram / CPU in top and the disk in iotop, hammering the disk/CPU (of a bad disk/ssd) can make kde feel slow.

plasmashell --replace # this just dumps plasmashell's widgets/panels

See if you got a lot of ram/CPU back or it's running well, if so if might be a bad widget or panel

if it's still slow,

kwin_x11 --replace

kwin_wayland --replace &

This dumps everything and refreshes the graphics driver/compositor/window manager

If that makes it better, you're likely looking at a graphics driver issue

I've seen some stuff where going to sleep and coming out degrades perf

[–] Passerby6497@lemmy.world 1 points 2 hours ago

I've seen some stuff where going to sleep and coming out degrades perf

I'll have to try some of these suggestions myself, as I've been dealing with my UI locking up if the monitors turn off and I wake it up too soon. Sometimes I still have ssh access to it, so thanks for the shell commands!

[–] boonhet@sopuli.xyz 1 points 13 hours ago (1 children)

Hmm, I haven't noticed high CPU usage, but usually it only leaves me around 500MB actually free RAM, basically the entire rest of it is either in use or cache (often about 15 gigs for cache). Turning on the 64 gig swapfile usually still leaves me with close to no free RAM.

I'll see if it's slow already when I get home, I restarted yesterday. Then I'll try the tricks you suggested. For all I know maybe it's not even KDE itself.

Root and home are on separate NVMe drives and there's a SATA SSD for misc non-system stuff.

GPU is nvidia 3060ti with latest proprietary drivers.

The PC does not sleep at all.

To be fair I also want to upgrade to speed up Rust compilation when working on side projects and because I often have to store 40-50 gigs in tmpfs and would prefer it to be entirely in RAM so it's faster to both write and read.

[–] rumba@lemmy.zip 3 points 13 hours ago (1 children)

Don't let me stop you from upgrading, that's got loads of upsides. Just suspecting you still have something else to fix before you'll really get to use it :)

It CAN be ok to have very low free ram if it's used up by buffers/cache. (freeable) If Buff/cache gets below about 3GB on most systems, you'll start to struggle.

If you have 16GB, it's running low, and you can't account for it in top, you have something leaking somewhere.

[–] boonhet@sopuli.xyz 2 points 10 hours ago (1 children)

Lol I sorted top by memory usage and realized I'm using 12 gigs on an LLM I was playing around with to get local code completion in my JetBrains IDE. It didn't work all that well anyway and I forgot to disable it.

I did have similar issues before this too, but I imagine blowing 12 gigs on an LLM must've exacerbated things. I'm wondering how long I can go now before I'm starting to run out of memory again. Though I was still sitting at 7 gigs buffer/cache and it hadn't slowed down yet.

[–] rumba@lemmy.zip 0 points 10 hours ago (1 children)

12/16, That'll do it. Hopefully that's all, good luck out there and happy KDE'ing

[–] boonhet@sopuli.xyz 1 points 6 hours ago

Well, 12/32. The rest was being used by Pycharm and Firefox mostly