KIconLoader Optimization Idea

[Luke Alan Sandell]

Hi, my name is Luke Sandell, and I am a student at Appalachian State
University looking for a project to do for Google's Summer of Coding. I had
an idea for optimization but I wanted to run it by this group before I
decide.

My idea deals with the never-ending saga of application startup times. From
watching the debug messages while KDE apps are starting up, it seems that a
significant amount of time is spent loading icons into memory. This is sad,
seeing as the same icons are used across the entire KDE session. It seems
to me that this could be avoided by making KIconLoader's internal cache
session-global. Right now, KDE doesn't have any classes for sharing memory
between applications (KSharedPixmap seems a bit overkill for 32x32 pixel
icons), but one could easily be developed using shm_open(). This would have
the added bonus that applications would not have identical copies of the
same data, and thus the KApplication memory footprint would decrease.
Additionally, the code developed for this project could be reused for
sharing other types of data between KDE apps to the same end.

What do you think? If this is not a good idea, feel free to suggest others.