Slow konqe on a PXA250

[Daniel Stenberg]

Hi all friendly people!

For evaluation purposes, I'm currently running Linux on an Intel XScale
PXA250 Processor (on one of them Intel development boards), running at 300MHz
with the memory clocked at 100MHz (or at times at 50MHz since the boards are
not really working at 100MHz very often). I have a 640x480 pixels LCD using
8bit colour. (Uh, fyi, the XScale is an ARM thing.)

I have konqueror-embedded-snapshot-20020311 built and running on top of the
Qt/E 2.3.2. (I have not done any particular optmizations or configurations,
merely got them working using the smallest amount of effort possible.) I run
the browser full-screen.

The system has 64MB ram and 10Mbit ethernet connection.

I find konqueror running unexpectedly slow on this configuration, and I'll
share some test observations:

I setup a single 100-bytes something HTML page, using only four images (each
being 600x100 pixels). No text.

I enter the URL for that HTML file in konqueror and press return. I can see
in my ethereal trace that the fetch of the HTML file flies by really fast.
(The http server is connected on the same hub as the devboard.)

Then it can take up to almost 3 seconds of no network traffic at all before
konqueror decides to get the first image. It then gets the second and third
images within a quite reasonable time (fractions of a second), just to again
make a pause before the 4th image is retrieved. This behavior is easy to
repeat and seem to be roughly the same whenever I test this.

So, having 4 JPEG images at ~7-8 KB each, takes roughly 7-8 seconds to
display! When having done that, and I enter the address again I get the
images from the internal cache, but that *too* takes many seconds to display!

Changing the JPEG images into GIF made the images ~60KB each but the timings
when loading from the net didn't differ much, but getting the images from the
cache is *a lot* faster than in the JPEG case!!

I've also produced a text file using 30 K text (the GPL license) and
displaying this here takes roughly 12-15 seconds.

All these times seem very excessive. I can't understand how it can be this
slow.  Can anyone bring me any clues on what I might be doing wrong or what I
can do next to improve performance on my setup?

-- 
      Daniel Stenberg - http://daniel.haxx.se - +46-705-44 31 77
   ech`echo xiun|tr nu oc|sed 'sx\([sx]\)\([xoi]\)xo un\2\1 is xg'`ol