KDE and speed

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Author: Kurt Granroth
Date:  
Subject: KDE and speed
On Monday 01 October 2001 07:44 pm, Lucas Vogel wrote:
> I am using Maxtor 7200 rpm disks on an ext2 file system. I have 136.34 MB
> of swap space, 99% of it untouched. Opening and closing the applications
> doesn't seem to make much, if any, difference when loading apps. 1-3
> seconds seems kind of long; if I use other applications they seem to snap
> along quite quickly. Even other GUIs seem to go along quite nicely(can't
> say for sure for gnome, but I'll check it out - I only use that for my vnc
> connection). I would almost go so far as to say that I seem to get the same
> kde response speed that I would using CLI commands from a ssh login at
> work.


Now are you talking about just "startup" speed (the time from clicking on an
icon to being able to interact with it's window) or are you also referring to
the responsivness of the app once it's loaded. The latter case includes such
attributes as amount of time it takes a menu or dialog to popup and the time
it takes to refresh onscreen data.

There is quite a bit of research being done on the startup speed issue. If
you are really interested in this area, I can put you in touch with some
people and give you pointers on where to start (hint: *most* of the problem
is with 'ld', not KDE itself). I will say that most people would be suprised
that you would be concerned with this since, well, 1-3 seconds is quit fast
for a substantial application. MOST people that care about this issue are on
substantially slower systems with slow drives (drivespeed makes more of a
difference than memory after a certain point).

Nobody is looking into responsiveness after loading, though, since we've 
never heard of any problems in that area.  In fact, Qt/KDE programs are hyper 
efficient in responsiveness.  To see what I mean, try running KDE over VNC  
(slow network preferred for full effect) then try running, say, GNOME.
-- 
Kurt Granroth            | http://www.granroth.org
KDE Developer/Evangelist | SuSE Labs Open Source Developer
         | 
            KDE -- Conquer Your Desktop