KDE4 slow

[Allan Sandfeld Jensen]

On Sunday 12 July 2009, Iñaki Baz Castillo wrote:
> El Jueves, 25 de Junio de 2009, Aaron J. Seigo escribió:
> > in the case of the "plasma is slow"
>
> I'm not sure if plasma is slow or not, but the fact is that it's all the
> time consuming too much resources:
>
>   PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND
>  3454 ibc       20   0  653m  46m  21m S    8  4.7   0:56.84 plasma-desktop
>
> This is the output of top command having Kontact, Yakuake and Konqueror
> open. I have no "extra" plasmoids in my desktop, just the common utilities
> in the desktop bar (system load viewer, NetworkManager applet, battery
> applet and Devices applet, no more).
>
> However, some times plama-desktop consumes more than 20% of CPU with same
> applications open.

All the KDE4 applications use an absolutely ridiculous amount of virtual 
memory. I don't know why, but I am guessing it is a Qt4 thing. Also the double 
buffering is consuming large amounts of X-resources. For instance increase the 
history size in konsole to something large (10000lines), and it will quickly 
"consume" 1.2Gbyte of virtual memory and 300Mbyte of X-resources. Though as 
long as the virtual memory is not resident, it shouldn't affect performance 
too badly.

Perhaps some optimizations could be made to make Qt4 be less memory hogging.

`Allan