Speed sensation

[Christian Esken]

Am Tuesday 15 April 2003 18:20 schrieb Aaron J. Seigo:
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> On Monday 14 April 2003 03:09, Christian Esken wrote:
> > I did some measurements 2  months ago. It's even slow with Arts disabled.
> > I was able to speed up kicker startup by 4-5 seconds on a PIII-450MHz by
> > producing a slightly trimmed down version.
>
> being familiar w/kicker's code base and knowing what a spaghetti mess it is
> in certain places (it's been through so many generations of
> development...), i'm interested: what did you trim down? did you remove
> certain applets? icons? extensions? did you remove actual code? what was

Basically I removed ZoomButton including all those hideous code dealing with 
it. And the "Button Background" stuff. All that "backgound icon" loading and 
initializing and repainting in certain situations takes time. Due to the many 
options kicker provides you can find really much code in kicker like:

if (very_special_situation && !zoomed) {
  // do something very special here
}

As I removed options I could eliminate many of those if-constructs.


And I stripped down the clock applet - but this cannot speed it up much, 
because all I removed was the different clock modes (I only left the "plain 
clock" in).

And I removed "ExtensionManager::the()->initialize();" on kicker startup, as 
as it is (normally) mot needed at startup. I changed it to 
initialize-on-demand, but I know that this patch was not 100% perfect.

There was some more fiddling, but I cannot remember all the details.

Otherwise my kicker variant was fully compatible with kicker (embed applets, 
support all kind of extension bars and so on).


> the start time before and after (the different of 4-5 seconds is
> impressive, but if it went from 6 to 1 seconds it's much more impressive
> than if it went from 15 to 10 seconds.)

1 second (ROTFL :) ... NO KDE application on the PIII-450 started in 1 second. 
Only stuff like xterm started in < 1sec. kwrite or konsole typically needed 
more than 3 seconds. KDE itself needed 30 seconds to start.

Actually I can't exactly tell, as I cannot precisely tell when kicker gets 
started. But I am sure it is more from 12 to 7 seconds. But it helped a lot, 
as KDE was actually usable in about 25 seconds instead of 30.

Chris