KDE4 slow

[Baas, Kevin]

while it's definitely very helpful to have a someone narrowing down the problem, that's usually the programmers job.  I am a programmer myself, and when someone comes to me with a demonstrable problem, i track it down and i fix it. that's my job.
 
as a programmer, one has lots of tools at their disposal that an everyday user, or even a tester (which essentially isn't much differen)  does not.  For instance, in this particular case, a programmer can put timestamps in the code, log them to a file, and look for big delays to find any bottlenecks.
 
As to what "part" of KDE (or "not KDE"), i believe the critics have already made that clear: the window manager.  (this may be "the desktop" as well, but in any case the GUI).  Hard for a user to get much more specific than that: "it takes a while to open and close or window."  "It takes a while to shut down KDE."  I believe someone actually counted the seconds it did each observable task for while shutting down.
 
As to "where in the code the problem(s) actually lie" - if someone knew that, they would have already fixed it.
As to "what the cause of the problem(s) are"  that has already been stated: 1.) shutdowning down KDE 2.) opening/closing windows, etc.  If someone had more detailed info than that to give, well, as w/the first item, they would have already fixed it.
As to "the severity and type of the problem(s)", this has already been answered, too:  type: performance.   severity: would prefer to use KDE 3 because of it.
 

________________________________

From: Aaron J. Seigo [mailto:aseigo at kde.org]
Sent: Thu 6/25/2009 2:38 PM
To: Contributors support and coordination, to make KDE rock!
Subject: Re: KDE4 slow



On Thursday 25 June 2009, Alvaro Aguilera wrote:
> in comparison to KDE3. The applications from KDE4 work great and fast, when
> they run outside KDE4, so the problem must reside at the window manager, or
> similar. It would be great to have a KDE4-lite version, without plasma, and
> with a very basic, very fast, window manager. Having kde3 and kde4

so, the problem with this entire conversation is that none of you are actually
measuring anything. while i'm sure it's enjoyable to gripe about things,
without measurement there is no way to know:

* where in the code the problem(s) actually lie

* what the cause of the problem(s) are

* the severity and type of the problem(s)

without that information it's quite impossible to make things better. if you
want to help improve things, then investigate and measure. do some sleuth
work. simply saying "oh, we should have a version that does $FOO" will likely
end up with little improvement and just as likely provide a worse experience.

someone mentioned kio slaves, and that's an interesting case in point. "plasma
was really slow" was the report we got from some people; turns out it was
kio_http that was going nuts and taking 100% cpu. it was getting launched by a
plasma widget that uses http, so it gave the impression it was plasma. in that
case, it wasn't.

there are other such examples. so while there is certainly room for
improvements, there's work to be done to make them happen. leaping to
conclusions without doing the investigation part of that work doesn't help,
but just spreads misinformation which some of us then get to spend the next
years cleaning up after.

i want kde4 to be as fast as possible, just like you. let's try and actually
make that happen.

--
Aaron J. Seigo
humru othro a kohnu se
GPG Fingerprint: 8B8B 2209 0C6F 7C47 B1EA  EE75 D6B7 2EB1 A7F1 DB43

KDE core developer sponsored by Qt Software



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