KDE4 slow

[Aaron J. Seigo]

On Thursday 25 June 2009, Karl Sinn wrote:
> Am Donnerstag, 25. Juni 2009 21:38:24 schrieb Aaron J. Seigo:
> > 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.
>
> What kind of measures do you need?
> How to do them?

it will vary from case to case. let's take a look at "my windowing is too 
slow" there are simple observational tasks that can be done:

* try a different window manager within plasma, to see if changing that one 
variable improves things

* try kwin4 with kdesktop/kicker and see if altering that variable improves 
things

* try a different widget style (as someone noted, the gradients in oxygen can 
be hard on some systems)

* try a different window decoration

* try: KDE_SKIP_ARGB_VISUALS=1 plasma-desktop

* watch the output of top while performing the tasks that cause problems and 
see which processes are using CPU

* see if you can determine specifics about what causes problems and what does 
not; someone noted that kcalc starts in ~.5s while dragon takes ~5s. that's an 
interesting clue: it shows that it's possible to start a kde4 app quickly, so 
what is dragon doing differently? is it the media stack that's causing slow 
downs in start up time, for instance? finding variance is often helpful.

from there we can identify where we ought to be looking and then we can get 
into more technical tools, like generating call graphs for developers to 
analyze using valgrind and its various tools such as massif or callgrind.

when possible solutions are identified, it's really handy to be able to pass 
patches from developers to testers to get some broader testing on them done.

-- 
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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