[kde-freebsd] KDE4 processes (10-CURRENT r255948, ports r328930), slimm down for netbook?

[Schaich Alonso]

On Thu, 10 Oct 2013 10:01:49 +0200
Matthias Apitz <guru at unixarea.de> wrote:

> Hello,
> 
> I have prepared a bootable USB key with 10-CURRENT and KDE4 from ports;
> it boots fine in my little EeePC 900, takes around 90 secs until
> login: and KDE4 starts fine too, takes around 240 secs from "startx" to
> be able to start an xterm application in KDE4 desktop; i.e. it works,
> even from such a slow USB key which has a read performance of 1 to 17 MByte
> per sec, depending of the blocksize 512 or 8m;
> 
> All this is only a proof of concept to prepare such USB key to boot from
> and reinstall from it the system on my EeePC netbook which runs at
> the moment r235646 with KDE3 (which is now dropped from our ports tree).
> 
> It seems that KDE4 launches a lot of applications or services which I
> will not need, for example all these akonadi_maildir processes (see
> attached "ps -ax" output; for what they are good for?
> 
> Any hints to slimm down the KDE4 on a minimum for small netbooks?
> 
> Thx
> 
> 	matthias
> 
> [...]

The USB media is not the bottleneck here. The box I'm writing this email from
uses an USB key which is even slower than yours as boot/root/usr.local (i.e.
the things are don't need to be backup-ed), in order to be able to perform a
full bootup even if the ZRAID fails to come online, and I can launch have
konsole/konqueror in like 60 seconds from POST. Dual Xeon E5-2620 and
"enough" memory though.

You can configure some of the kde background activies using "systemsettings"
from kde4-workspace. There's a KCM* called "startup and shutdown" in the
"system administration" section, which has several fields to configure
background services and application autostart/session resuming.

Also, in the "application appearance" KCM of the common appearance and
behaviour section systemsettings has a graphical effects setting in it's
"fine tuning" tab of the "style" (i'll call it ``page'' for now, the thing to
select on the left) that has some impact on performance over here.

If you have nepomuk/strigi indexing service installed and running, disabling
it might save a considerable amount of storage IO. It can be disabled using
the "desktop search" KCM of the workspace appearance and behaviour section of
systemsettings. Of cause, not installing nepomuk to begin with also works ;)

Hope that helped,
        Alonso

*KCM means KDE Configuration Module, it's the items systemsettings.