Has The performance been forgotten?

[Trevor Smith]

On October 7, 2004 10:34 pm, canllaith at yahoo.co.uk wrote:
> I have always found KDE under Slackware to be a great environment for older
> machines that have at least 256MB, as the preloading of libs make QT
> applications quicker to launch under KDE than GTK applications are under
> Gnome in my experience.

Very interesting this message should come in today. I just today got 
frustrated and timed some things. I was wondering if in fact Gnome apps would 
load significantly faster under Gnome than KDE apps under KDE. Actually I was 
wondering about Firefox under Gnome (which I rarely ever use) but did a few 
test. Here's what I found:

AMD Athlon XP-M 2800+ laptop (so probably slower bus and HD than I would like 
to have) with 512 meg RAM running FC2 with kernel-2.6.8-1.521 and KDE 
3.3.0-2.2.2.kde and whatever the latest version of Gnome I got from 'yum 
update' is. First number is time in seconds for first attempt at load, second 
and third are repeated attempts (so the app in question has just been loaded 
then closed). Times were measured using my runner's watch by hand. (use a 
fixed font to view)

                           KDE                Gnome
login to desktop  | 25.72/13.98/13.69 | 29.29/15.72/16.11
kcalc             | 4.51/3.11/3.85    | 9.61/3.76/3.66
gnumeric          | 7.33/3.29/3.19    | 4.84/2.79/2.94
openoffice calc   | 28.50/12.31/14.67 | 28.65/5.83/5.74
firefox           | 5.37/1.61/1.81    | 4.98/1.82/2.08
terminal window   | 2.23/1.94/1.65    | 2.01/1.14/0.98

On my system I can login to KDE slightly faster than Gnome (measuring til the 
time the task bar and icons are drawn and the splash screen is gone) and 
kcalc loads (under KDE) roughly like gnumeric does under Gnome (although 
kcalc seems to be dismally crappy compared to gnumeric) and firefox is 
roughly the same on both systems. Terminal windows (and nautilus windows 
compared to konqueror windows, although I didn't measure these latter two) 
were a bit snappier on Gnome.

The big surprise, for me, was that openoffice calc, which is a ridiculous pig 
under FC2 (the older OO under FC1 was VERY snappy on this laptop), actually 
loads in half the time under Gnome (for reloads) as it does on KDE. Weird. 
But it still takes forever the first time on both desktops.

So my question: if there is some way I can preload or hold in memory any 
libraries so that pigs like Open Office will load faster, where can I get 
this magic info?

I think I'll switch to gnumeric since it does all I need and loads in a 
quarter the time OO does (under KDE).


-- 
Trevor Smith // trevor at haligonian.com
___________________________________________________
This message is from the kde mailing list.
Account management:  https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/kde.
Archives: http://lists.kde.org/.
More info: http://www.kde.org/faq.html.