Has The performance been forgotten?

[Alexander Neundorf]

Hi Bahram,

I'm not sure it is really a good idea to cross post this to 10 different 
mailing lists.

So...
On Friday 08 October 2004 16:40, Bahram Alinezhad wrote:
> It looks that more people are admitting the
> performance lack...

what do you want to say with this email ? Of course KDE people are concerned 
about performance, no news there. 

> ---------------------------------------------------
> "alberto-g" (alberto-g at inventati.org)
> wrote:
> ---------------------------------------------------
...


> KDE: 600 times slower in bzip2!
>  ___________________________________________________________________________
> |               |           |           |           |           |          |
> |   TIMES TO    |           |           |           |           |          |
> |   EXTRACT     |  Konsole  |   file-   | Konqueror |  WinRAR   |          |
> |   IN          |           |   roller  |           |           |          |
> |   SECONDS     |           |           |           |           |          |
> |_______________|___________|___________|___________|__________|___________|
> ___________________________________________________________________________
>|               |           |           |           |           |           |
>|    Mozilla    |           |           |           |           |           |
>|     1.7.3     |           |           |           |           |           |
>|    .tar.gz    |     2     |     5     |     11    |     3     |           |
>|_______________|___________|___________|___________|___________|___________|
>|               |           |           |           |           |           |
>|     GTK+      |           |           |           |           |           |
>|     2.4.3     |           |           |           |           |           |
>|    .tar.bz2   |     35    |     143   |   21333   |     44    |           |
>|_______________|___________|___________|___________|___________|___________|
>
> Also note:
> - I didn't wait for 21333 seconds! %9 of the extraction took 32 minutes and 
> I estimated the total time.
> - All observations have been made in SuSE 9.1, except the WinRAR that done 
> in Win98-SE.

Ok, some comments: you didn't measure the 21000 seconds as you state yourself, 
the reason is understandable. Still that's why the number isn't reliable.
I just tried to open qt-embedded-preview-4.0.0-tp2.tar.bz2 (14 MB) with konqy 
from KDE 3.2 on my Athlon XP 2000+, it took 13 seconds. I know this box is 
much faster than yours, but not 1600 times faster.

I know there have been major perormance problems with the tar ioslave (as used 
in konqy), but I can remember somebody posted a patch and I thought it was 
applied. But I'm not sure when this was and whether it was actually applied 
and whether the KDE version shipped with Suse comes with this patch.

>- Count the KDE boot time after that it is ready to
> run Konqueror (e.g. when all system tray icons
> appeared in SuSE 9.1); before it, the desktop is not
> usable yet.

The tips on Lubos' page are good. You can also have a look at the kde/share/
Autostart/ directory and move things you don't need out.
You could also disable session restoring if you want to.

Is DMA and 32bit access for your harddisk enabled ? Check using hdparm /dev/
hda.

> I regret I'm not a programmer and cannot participate
> in development, and sometimes cannot understand how
> much difficult can be offering a fast, beautiful, and
> bug-free software.

You can help: http://quality.kde.org/ :-)

> KDE lead to other projects like QT; Similarly, many
> projects may be known responsible for a certain issue,
> but all in uncertainty, and all may deny! If such a

Well, as you put in your other email, at least we didn't deny.

> The performance issue here is not around %2 or %10: We
> have a great unreal slowness that requires severe
> notice; When your N hours spent on it saves N*10000
> hours of user's times, isn't it worth doing a tedious
> work?

This isn't a realistic calculation.
IMO it's the application startup which is slow in KDE. Once you got the app 
running I don't notice obvious performance problems (PIII/450 MHz, 128 MB, 
KDE 3.1).
I log in once a day, start konqy with several tabs, start konsole with several 
tabs, and these both live for a long time and I don't have to start them very 
often every day. So, faster app startup would save me approx. maybe 1 minute 
per day. This gets lost in the noise (of time consumption).

(and just a note: OOo and Eclipse are even slower than KDE)

> Isn't it a good impression to say that "THE FASTEST
> LINUX" when introducing a new version or distribution?

Yes, of course. 
Some nitpicking: KDE can't do much for the fastest "linux", it can do 
something for a faster KDE.
And maybe try another distro...

Bye
Alex
-- 
Work: alexander.neundorf at jenoptik.com - http://www.jenoptik-los.de
Home: neundorf at kde.org                - http://www.kde.org
      alex at neundorf.net               - http://www.neundorf.net