[kde-freebsd] News on Performance-Problems

[Hannes Hauswedell]

Hi everyone,

I spent most of today investigating the performance issues everyone(?) 
of us is experiencing. Heres some interesting things I found out that 
hopefully will help solving at least some performance issues:

First of all I found out that some performance problems are not 
connected to kde4 but actually to qt4.4.0. This was obvious since an 
application I develop, KPorts, is qt-only and start-up-time changed 
from ~12seconds to ~3minutes upon upgrading qt-4.3.1 to qt-4.4.0.

I had a closer look at KPorts startup-functions to see where slowdowns 
in qt can possily occur. The function that runs during start-up does 
several things, which I wont explain in detail. It boils down to 
disk-io(only reading), string-handling (splitting, sectioning..), and 
creation of new objects.
By commenting out relevant passages I could proved that its neither of 
the first two. So I thought it must something with memory allocation 
during creation of objects. I wrote a test-app for that and found out 
that allocating new QObjects is same speed on qt-4.3.1 vs qt-4.4.0.
(=> memory allocation isnt the problem)

Next things I checked was things going on in the constructors of the 
objects and I found out that its the connect()-calls which somehow got 
much slower from qt-4.3.1 to qt-4.4.0.

Sounds strange but it is the case. During startup of Kports about 80K 
objects are created that each create 3 Signal-Slot-Connections to a 
static object for error handling.
After temporarily removing the connect()-calls kports, startup-time went 
from >3minutes to ~6seconds!!!

I wrote a test-application to benchmark creation of 
signal-slot-connections and it confirms that creating a connection 
takes at least twice as long with qt-4.4.0.
I attached the code, it creates 2million connections and tells you how 
long it took. (note that you have to ctrl-c to quit the program).

Please check whether the time needed to create these connections on your 
machines differs on qt-4.3.1 vs qt-4.4.0 as well. I have 10seconds on 
qt43 vs 20seconds on qt44 ( I know that doesnt completely explain the 
time difference in kports but it seems significant).

I'm not sure this problem is responsible for all performance issues, but 
signal-and-slotting sure is used everywhere, so slowdown there could 
explain a lot.

Greetings
Hannes
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