Let's break this silence

[Olivier Goffart]

Hi,

I think KDE needs indeed help in that respect.  Optimizing is really not 
something easy to do, so if you are willing to contribute in that area, be 
welcome.

The first step is finding out what exactly is taking time/memory.  So one has 
to use a profiler or some tool to find out.  And once we know it is usually 
easy to fix the low hanging fruits.

But simply guessing what is wrong, will unfortunately not lead anywhere.

Regarding your suggestion about memory allocations, i am not sure that it will 
help a lot, unless you profiled it.  Allocations are quite fast these days. It 
might be an important work to remove only few of those allocations for no 
perceptible gain. 
So we really need to know where are the bottleneck. And not go blindly.

Thanks for volunteering :-)

-- 
Olivier


Le Saturday 21 August 2010, Mohammad Ebrahim Mohammadi Panah a écrit :
> Hi everybody (if any!),
> 
> Who am I?
> I'm a long time KDE user, who also has some minor contributions to KDE
> here and there. I'm also a software developer, specially high
> performance software, usually using C++.
> 
> (Let me say it first: I'm really sorry if my words bother you. I'll be
> narrating some sad dramas.)
> 
> Why am I here?
> I'm dissatisfied with KDE performance, CPU-wise, memory-wise, etc.
> This is one of my stories: one day me and my KDE-using friend were
> talking about everything, and then he said KDE is bloatware. First I
> tried to tell him KDE is not that bad. But after I checked memory
> usage on my own system, I found out unfortunately he's right. A
> regular KDE 4.4 desktop alone was using around 500 megs of RAM. My
> friend runs many (bloated) apps, so he needs all bytes of his RAM!
> After a few days I met him again. He had switched to Gnome. He told me
> he's much happier now with his faster and less bloated desktop,
> although he still ran some KDE apps on his Gnome desktop. :(
> It seems there is a problem with KDE which should be fixed. I searched
> around the internet for KDE optimization content. But almost all the
> info was years old, and for the KDE3 age. The most promising reference
> I found was this mailing list. I took a look at archive and... aaah, I
> should have guessed.
> 
> Now what?
> I think there is room to make KDE faster and less memory hungry,
> although I haven't dug deep into the issue. I thought I should discuss
> the issue with you, the more experienced KDE developers/optimizers, to
> see what's your idea. Is there any plan/roadmap/strategy for
> optimizing KDE? Any guides or guidelines? Have you documented your KDE
> optimization experience anywhere? What's your ideas about how we can
> optimize KDE?
> 
> A crude idea to make things more spicy: What's your idea about
> removing some dynamic memory allocations by using stack in place of
> heap?
> 
> BTW I really like to know how many people are reading this mail! (I
> hope it is not zero.)
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