KDE and speed

[Kurt Granroth]

On Tuesday 02 October 2001 06:43 pm, Lucas Vogel wrote:
> This is what I'm talking about - on my 1Ghz processor, my 7200 rpm hard
> drive, and everything else, netscape takes over 7 seconds to load - and I
> just loaded it previously about 20 minutes ago.  Konqueror takes about 4-5
> seconds. I don't think this is acceptable performance - in fact, I think
> it's pretty darn slow. Call me crazy, tell me where my bottlenecks might
> be, but this to me is too slow.

Okay, what I'm getting from you now is that you think loading any GUI program 
in Linux is too slow... not just KDE programs.

You are right.  Compared to, say, Windows, Linux is *much* slower loading and 
starting applications.  You don't really notice it when you load command line 
programs since most are quite small.  You do notice it with GUI code because 
even the small ones have huge libraries.  This takes quite a bit longer 
because the Linux loader is very inefficient and the more symbols that need 
to be resolved, the longer it takes.

There *is* work being done at the system level to help alleviate this 
problem.  I don't know when the time to delivery is.

On the KDE side, we've tried to jump start this process a bit with some local 
hacks.  For instance, most KDE apps are started with the 'kdeinit' process 
which already has the KDE libraries loaded and resolved.  This saves the 
linker a *lot* of time compared to loading the libs from scratch.  There is 
also the experimental "objprelink" code with tries to resolve all the symbols 
at compiletime.  This results in significantly faster startup times.. at the 
expense of stability.  We've had a lot of reports of crashes with objprelink.
-- 
Kurt Granroth            | http://www.granroth.org
KDE Developer/Evangelist | SuSE Labs Open Source Developer
granroth@kde.org         | granroth@suse.com
            KDE -- Conquer Your Desktop