KIconLoader Optimization Idea

[Friedrich W. H. Kossebau]

Am Sonntag, 5. Juni 2005 15:45, schrieb 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.

Might be a good think to do, yes :) 

I have no clue, but what about a special X server extension which holds the 
icons? My sparse memory suggests me that the icons are hold as elements in 
the X server anyway (QPixmaps) but the problem with sharing between apps was 
IIRC something with having no access control, thus no knowledge whether the 
icons still look like they are supposed. Anybody with more background here?

Martijn's remark concerning KStandardDirs are valid, though. That would need 
some research if this feature is used, at first :)

Regards
Friedrich
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