Re: slooooooow

[John Gay <johngay@eircom.net>]

On Sat 27 Jul 2002 21:59, Frank Van Damme wrote:
> Yow
>
> Just put my hd (maxtor 40 gigs 5400 rpm for therecord - that's also the one
> I swap to) into a p133 (48 MB ram) because my athlon cpu burnt. 
This is your problem ^^^^^^^

KDE requires quite a large amount of memory to run. If you consider that X 
takes at least 16M to itself that does not leave much for KDE to use.

My daughter is running KDE2.1 on a 166PentiumMMX with 64M and get 'useable' 
performance from it. I would not even like to try running KDE in less than 
64M.

> I just
> couldn't believe my eyes. I thought kde got faster with 3.0, at least
> that's what the kde guys promised us. Some stats, taken on my system
> running enlightenment 0.16, xfree86 4.2 and a minimum of background tasks
Here is another ^^^ problem. Enlightenment is very resource intensive as well.
Maybe even more so than KDE proper. Mixing this WITH KDE apps on a 
memory-starved box is jsut asking for problems. Are you sure you don't work 
for that group that 'proved' M$ ran faster than Linux by patching M$ for 
performance and disabling every feature on Linux?

> like cups and 2 Eterms:
>
> - opening a "new message" window in kmail: 10 seconds
> - starting konqueror: about 5 minutes
> - starting kmail: must be over 2 minutes.
> - selecting an other message in this mailing list (800 messages): about 2
> secs - scrolling through theheader pane: an estimated 3 fps
> - starting the stupidest program on earth, ksnapshot: 25 secs
> - average cpu usage reading emails: 80%.
> - megs of swap mem used: 50.
>
> Just *unbearable*. I have yet to start thinking about what running a
> fullblown kde session on this box will do.  I remember having 7 apps like
> kword, xmms, kmail,... open at the same time and still enjoying it. Ok
> kmail was never fast but can anyone recommend me a good DE or compiler
> please :-)

First things first. Get some more memory. This generation of box should be 
able to handle at least 64M without complaining. I know that's easier said 
than done, but memory is the key to speed. Without enough memory even a P4 
will run like a dog.

For alt. Desktops, XFCE is extremely light-weight, very configurable and 
drag-N-drop aware. If you've never seen CDE before it might take a little 
getting used to, but getting rid of Enlightenment and using XFCE instead will 
give enormous improvement. Once you've got the QT and KDE libs, most of your 
KDE apps should still work, though XFCE is NOT KDE aware, what ever that 
means any more.

If you want to go the self-compiled route I can tell you, from experience 
QTlibs took over 48 Hours to build on a 200Mhz PentiumMMX with a similar 
amount of memory. KDE libs take even longer. Again, memory is the key here. 
GCC tries to use large hash tables in memory to reduce I/O. However, if you 
are still willing to spend upto a week 'round the clock' there are many 
object pre-linking optimizations that can be used with QT and KDE, though 
they can be dodgy. They have been known to just not work on certain hardware, 
so you might end up spending a week compiling something that will not even 
run. YMMV.

Hope this expains a few things for you.

Cheers,

	John Gay


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