Slow konqe on a PXA250

[Mayuresh Kathe]

Hi,

On Wed, 20 Nov 2002, Daniel Stenberg wrote:

> Hi all friendly people!

Hello there :-)

> 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.)

Sounds good, where and how much did you buy that for?

> 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.

Optimisations are required for smaller binary or lesser resource usage.
Hope you have atleast used the recommended JPEG and PNG libs.

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

Excellent hardware for Konq/e :-)

> 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.

Thats great, it'll push the sys to its limits :-)

> 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.

Thats funny :-(
No network traffic for 3 seconds after issuing a fetch is an impossible
state (mind you, I am not being derisive of your observations).

The only thing that comes to my mind is that there must be network
traffic, just that Konq/e might be taking 3 seconds to get all the images
to its cache before displaying them.
Secondly, Konq/e (AFAIK) doesn't do progressive display of content like
rest of the web browsers, it first gets everything and then displays it
all at one go (am I right Simon and Paul?)

> 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!

Thats even more intriguing...

> 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!!

The case is getting even more complex, wheres Ol' man Simon ;^)

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

Thats again a problem of non-progressive display of content.

I guess thats one area Konq/e needs to address with utmost priority.

~Mayuresh