[Bug 163243] plasma uses huge amount of CPU time

[Alan Braslau]

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http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=163243         




------- Additional Comments From alan.braslau cea fr  2008-06-09 11:58 -------
Thank you for your attention to this issue.

Of course, there is no plot to eat-up CPU time. However, I do suspect that most developers work on fairly recent, duo-core, multi-processor machines and don't necessarily notice so severely the effects on performance due to bloat. The rest of us work with less powerful machines, nevertheless, largely sufficient for the work at hand. That is, if we are not seduced by all of the animations and other gizmos and gadgets. These are indeed impressive to the average user, and exciting for the developer, but, frankly, of limited use for real users. Nevertheless, having stated that, some new features do indeed lead to real gains in productivity, so one need to be careful not to condemn them all.

Just for information, I am working with a single Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 CPU 2.60GHz processor and 1Gb of memory, as well as a portable equipped with a single Pentium M 2.0Ghz processor with 1Gb of memory, now outdated but hardly obsolete.

Getting back to the subject of the bug report, as one can see from my above comments, stripping down the desktop, exiting and reentering KDE, or even rebooting the machine may not be sufficient, given that hidden background processes may be restarted upon login. I was able to clean things up by switching to a virtual console, using then ps and kill before switching back to the X display and logging-out of my KDE session.

Therefore, for the 4.1 release, may I suggest being very careful to keep these performance issues in the forefront, and much has been improved in 4.1 Beta 1 since 4.0. Indeed, I see lots of comments on the net condemning KDE4 in this way, with resistance to change for this very reason. 

A possible solution is more of a wishlist than a bug: Missing from KDE4 is a very transparent session manager (to be able to clean-up within KDE), as well as a profile initializer. It could/should be much simpler than that available before in KDE3, for example offering only two choices: a minimal, "clean" KDE4 experience, and a fully-animated, spiffy, more complete desktop initialization.

Finally, "...almost like Windows". I guess that this is the extreme insult, and it almost provoked the "not-worth-to-spend-time-with" and "poor form" reactions. My taking the time to try to use Beta software and reporting bugs is aimed at providing feedback, not just an airing of frustration. But Windows-based systems are often imposed on us, and so I do fear seeing my beloved unix environment transformed in a similar fashion.