KDE: Speed issues

[Hanno Mueller <kontakt@hanno.de>]

Hi,


I am running KDE as my primary work environment on an outdated laptop with
a Pentium MMX 233 and 160 MB Ram. Because it is a laptop, its components
are slower than desktop PC components.

The machine runs Debian testing packages and KDE built for potato, using
the current XFree 3.x server from testing.

What I was wondering about: Is it just me or is KDE getting slower with
recent builds? My machine is of course slow by todays standards to begin
with, but it has more than enough RAM to cope with most heavy
applications.

Problem is: I cannot provide objective numbers, only anecdotical
reference.

When I started using KDE on with 2.0, it did not feel as slow as today.
Logging on the environment and starting applications appears to be much
slower than it used to.

Can anyone confirm this?


Also, there is this guy on Slashdot who keeps posting the following
whenever KDE is mentioned:

           Optimizing the source build (Score:5, Informative)
           by darial on Monday February 26, @08:52PM EST (#93)
           (User #177051 Info) 

           For those who build KDE from source, and ESPECIALLY the
           pacakagers at big distros, consider strongly doing the
           folowing:

           set the -no-g++-exceptions flag when building qt 

           and set the folowing options for all qt and kde: 
           -03 
           -mpentiumpro (or -march=pentiumpro for ppro only objs) 

           the exceptions optimization literally reduces the size of
           everyting related to qt by several megs a piece with no
           detriemntal effects. -03 is important because it
           turns on inlining, which is a big win for C++ code with
           lots of tiny functions. And optimizing for modern chips should
           be standard for anyone. These changes sped up my KDE load time
           by 50%, and made the whole thing feel much "snappier" and 
           smoother. Don't let KDE2 get a rep for slowness just because
           you used lousy compiler options. (and yes, I posted something
           similar to the kde2.0 article, but I'm going to repeat it until
           the packagers get it right)

Is he right? Could I help my machine by doing own builds for some specific
packages? Which ones? (I doubt that -mpentiumpro will help me on my
Pentium MMX, though.)


Greetings,

Hanno