comments on KDE performance tips

[David Leimbach]

On Wednesday, January 15, 2003, at 12:36 AM, Shridhar Daithankar wrote:

> On 13 Jan 2003 at 15:03, Alexander Kellett wrote:
>
>> On Mon, Jan 13, 2003 at 06:28:05AM -0800, Neil Stevens wrote:
>>> And what's the alternative?  Tell them to learn a foreign language 
>>> while
>>> waiting for KDE apps to load?
>>
>> new binutils (with combreloc) + a new glibc.
>> i.e, any of the new distributions.
>
> I have been reading this list for some 3-4 days and I can't help to 
> notice that
> all the discussions are centred to linux.
>

Yeah... I have complained about this before... The justification is 
"people only know what they know", you know?
I can't blame someone for involuntary ignorance of another OS's 
particularities.  I will say however that if someone proclaimed a linux 
kernel driver for KDE that I would be kind of pissed off about it since 
no one else would have a chance in hell of being able to run it until 
it was ported. [which can be tricky... :)]

Just like if I wrote a KDE extension using a "home-brewed" threading 
technology that only works with FreeBSD 5.x KSEs I would expect other 
people to not be very receptive.

> Nothing  wrong with that but when we are looking at optimising KDE, 
> cross-OS
> performance should be seen as well.
>

As long as you keep in mind that sometimes the kernel really *is* the 
difference in speed depending on what resources have been used.  Pipes 
for instance are really friggin fast on linux and not so good in many 
other places.

> I have a dual boot PC at home. Mandrake 9 and freeBSD4.7. They have 
> almost same
> version of KDE, 3.0.4 and 3.0.3
>

I only have FBSD 5.x and Mac OS X at home...  I am beginning to take 
maintainership of KDE on DarwinPorts.

> When I say startx in mandrake, it takes 45 sec. to come up with KDE 
> with
> sessions running which includes a sole konsole.

>
> On freeBSD, it takes 15 seconds to do the same thing.
>

I experienced the same between SuSE 8.0 Pro and FreeBSD 4.7/4.6.   Not 
exactly the same times though.

> Both the test times were measured after boot up i.e. no disk caching. 
> I have P-
> 733/128MB/40GB seagate disk.
>
> On my office machine, P-IV-1GHz/512MB/40 GB seagate, I get 35 sec. for 
> mandrake
> and 15 sec. for freeBSD.
>
> Considering that mandrake has gcc-3.2 and freeBSD4.7 has gcc-2.95-4, I 
> would
> have expected it the other way round. But the difference is so large 
> that I can
> not imagine what must be causing it.
>
> On freeBSD, KDE is as fast as GNOME on mandrake. I might ditch 
> mandrake just
> for this single reason.
>

Try building KDE from source... Try using Konstruct... report results 
back.  I think it could be the rpms you are using.

> Are there any tricks from freeBSD land need to be ported to linux? I 
> can not
> imagine a faster KDE than it is on freeBSD.
>

Ask on #kde-freebsd or check out http://freebsd.kde.org.

>
> Bye
>  Shridhar

Thanks for the information! :)

>
> --
> Thought for the day:
>     Communist (n): one who has given up all hope
>     of becoming a Capitalist.
>
>
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