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List:       kde-linux
Subject:    Re: [kde-linux] Why is it so SLOW? (repost)
From:       "Bruce J.A. Nourish" <kode187 () kode187 ! net>
Date:       2003-04-23 6:13:27
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Hey everyone,

I came late to this conversation so I hope I'm not missing anything big...

On Thursday 24 April 2003 05:20 am, James Richard Tyrer wrote:
> Paul Yeager wrote:
> > The laptop is an old Compaq Armada 7710 MT, which has a 150 MHz Pentium
> > MMX and 144 meg of ram.  This machine has acceptable performance under
> > Winblows 98, but things take forever in KDE.  For example, from the time
> > I click the icon for Konsole on the panel to the appearance of the
> > Konsole window is about 5 seconds.  Invoking Mozilla from the panel icon
> > takes 35 seconds.

I think the mystery is solved. Your machine doesn't have the juice for KDE. At 
the risk of bieng lynched, I'd venture to say that you should switch to one 
of the lean-mean window managers. I would use IceWM. And I would definitely 
can mozilla: it is probably the second largest resource hog you could 
possibly try to run. Use phoenix instead.

On a more general note (and at the risk of bieng painfully tortured before my 
lynching) I would say that most Open Source GUI software is rather poorly 
optimized compared to the proprietary competition. Optimization is a 
thankless, tiring job. You don't get to point at a menu item or button an 
say, "I made that!"  - the kudos motivation for OSS development almost 
disappears. Proprietary software houses substitute cash for kudos - something 
we can't do.

> After you boot the system, open: "ksysguard" and see how much
> Physical & Swap are being used.  If Swap is more than 0, you are
> short of memory and are using virtual memory which will make
> applications slow to start.
>
> Then there is a suggestion that sounds almost like voodoo to me.
>
>   Change this line in: Xservers:
> :0 local@tty1 /bin/nice -n -10 /usr/X11R6/bin/X vt7
>
> Does anyone know if this actually does any good?

What do you mean by "good"? Raising the priority of the X server will allow 
the X server to have almost as much CPU time as it likes. Ergo, the user 
should see faster I/O response from X. Of course, the kernel does this by 
withholding time from other processes, so everything else on the system will 
be slower. 
-- 
Bruce J.A. Nourish <kode187@kode187.net>

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