Re: slooooooow

[Frank Van Damme <frank.vandamme@student.kuleuven.ac.be>]

On Saturday 27 July 2002 23:24, John Gay wrote:
> 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 would rather say that the bottleneck is the software :-) . I remember having 
konqueror, kmail, pan (gnome stuff), kword, then some instant messaging 
clients and a ton of Eterms open. Now I can bring the box to it's knees with 
just kmail alone.

> > 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

I think this is a mistake commonly made about E. E is just as resource-hungry 
as you make it. With 2 desktops and a *simple* theme and wallpaper it takes 
about 2 or 3 megs more then windowmaker with the same eyecandy (read: as 
little eye-candy as possible).

> for that group that 'proved' M$ ran faster than Linux by patching M$ for
> performance and disabling every feature on Linux?

You mean enabling? I am asking that to myself every now and then :-) . 
No problem with minimum requirements going up, and off course I just don't try 
to do this with windows 98 or 2k, which need 64 megs just to boot them up. 
Well actually I did. But I don't want to compare with a platform which is 
made heavier artificially. Heck, watching a stupid program clog up the 
performance on a box with 50.331.648 bytes of mem running a system which is 
supposed to expand the life cycle of boxes by a few years just scares me. If 
they could make programs run fast 3 years ago, why can't the same programs 
run at the same speed now? I was especcially astonished because I ran kde1 
and kde2 on this box as well as kde3. One of the biggest issues with kde2 was 
the performance, so a lot of effort was put into making it faster - so I was 
wondering wether these experimental packages might be compiled with a 
badly-chosen version of gcc or anything. It's not only the mem you see - I 
can swap to a reletivaly fast disk and cpu usage is high. It's not that I use 
stuff like mosfet's theme (my dad has a Xp theme and ditto mozilla IE skin 
however ;-) )

> > like cups and 2 Eterms:
[...]
> > 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.

Off course. Surely I upgraded it when I started gnu/linux for the same reason: 
kde did not really work well with only 16 megs ;-)

> 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.

That "kde aware" means you can use it to run with kde instead of kwin I think. 

> 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.

Uhhu. I see. 

> Hope this expains a few things for you.

> Cheers,
>
> 	John Gay



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