On Fri, 10 Jul 2009 13:03:59 David C. Rankin wrote:
Listmates,
After 2 months working with kde 4.3 beta 2, one thing that is apparent is that it feels slow compared to kde3. Menu crispness, start time, etc. are all very sluggish compared to kde3. I rarely use kde3 anymore, but when I do start kde3, I'm amazed at how fast it is compared to kde4.
This isn't because my laptop is just slow. AMD Turion-58, 4G of RAM, SATA II drive, the hardware should be fine. Start time on kde3 on this box is just about 7 seconds (login to desktop loaded). KDE4 is well over 25 seconds to accomplish the same task.
Are there any tips for speeding kde4 up? We are now at 4.2.96 from factory x86_64. Sven, etc. do you see any speed improvements for kde4 coming?
David, My system (AMD Athlon XP 2600, NVidia GeForce FX 5500, 1GB Ram) runs OK (just) with KDE4 with compositing turned on but I tend to see processor usage hitting 100% and top shows a load average of 2.5+. Kwin tends to be using between 30 and 50% of the available CPU time. Disabling compositing (and hence desktop effects) using Alt+Shift+F12 dramatically drops the CPU load and restores the system to KDE3 type speed. This is not only restricted to KDE4 though - I used to see exactly the same behaviour with KDE3 + Compiz on 10.3 and 11.0. On the other hand, Gnome + Compiz does not show the same behaviour (in fact it runs fine with no noticeable slowdown). Unfortunately, I just don't like Gnome very much compared to KDE3 or KDE4 (but some so, and that's OK - that's why we have choices...). It seems to me that KDE + Desktop Effects (whether internal or via compiz) demands very decent graphics hardware. BTW, I run dual-head on my box too (can't go back to working with a single screen after using dual for >4 years). BTW, I tend to leave desktop effects turned on unless I'm watching video/tv or doing some other resource-intensive task, otherwise I put up with a slight slowdown (which doesn't render the system unusable by any means). Cheers, Rodney. -- =================================================== Rodney Baker VK5ZTV rodney.baker@iinet.net.au ===================================================