Can I speed up KDE ?

Message

Grayman · Post by **Grayman** » Fri Jul 02, 2004 8:12 pm

Hi I was just wondering if anybody has any tips reguarding speeding up KDE - and no I don't want to change to Fluxbox or similar - Just need speed. I have a pentium4 2.6 so this should go reasonably fast surely ? I added Opera, Mozilla, Bluefish, Xmms Gimp, Guarddog, Knights and OpenOffice, but otherwise this is a standard KDE install. (OK OpenOffice is a big prog, I grant you.). I have turned off virtually every GUI effect I can find, both through the Desktop Settings Wizard and through the control centre. I have a flat colour instead of a wallpaper or gradient etc. Please note that this is not a "crawling" slowness just not as fast (believe it or not) as Win XP - with which I am dual booting for my games and usb LG scanner. I used to have win98 on the other partition and that was a flier (installation of under 10 mins, and then came the drivers... sigh). I have added myself to the video group BTW. Any ideas people ?

I do run a Graphire 2 pen/mouse setup which shows in "Top" as one of the bigger processes, but we are talking less than a percent of the CPU power.

Grayman

El_Presidente_Pufferfish · Fri Jul 02, 2004 8:25 pm

try prelinking

Grayman · Post by **Grayman** » Fri Jul 02, 2004 8:34 pm

Hmm, funny I had forgotten about that one - Thank You

wrc1944 · Post by **wrc1944** » Fri Jul 02, 2004 9:51 pm

Here's a thread you might find interesting about kde "bloat," where you use a DO_NOT_COMPILE= option with emerge, and can cut a lot of things you never use out of kde. I've not tried it, but am really tempted to do so next time I compile kde.

http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php? ... notcompile

wrc1944

u2mike · Post by **u2mike** » Fri Jul 02, 2004 11:02 pm

Also, make sure you are using the latest version 3.2.3 or 3.2.2. They are both considerably faster then older versions.

drutten · Post by **drutten** » Fri Jul 02, 2004 11:08 pm

Is it just KDE that is slow and not the rest?
It might be things like enabling dma, using the right graphics drivers and so on.
Have you tried an other wm to see if it's as slow? ( gnome / xfce ... )

Jinidog · Post by **Jinidog** » Sat Jul 03, 2004 9:17 am

What are your CFLAGS and your kernel?

My KDE runs absolutly fast on an AthlonTB 1200C (turned on all graphical effects) and it also runs quite fast on an K6-2 450 MHz.
(much faster than it was with Win98)

What exactly do you mean with slowness?
Are the menus building up slow?
Is the Desktop reacting slow?
Or are applications launching slow?

Grayman · Post by **Grayman** » Sat Jul 03, 2004 10:09 pm

It's nothing really big or major - the power is definitely there (compiling two progs as I type here, while downloading 2 others, and no mouse hesitation etc) but I just feel there is a momentary hesitation when, for instance, clicking on the start menu, or one of the quick-browse ones on my taskbar (old Win98 habit, I guess

), which I don't get in XP. Obviously I don't test this while compiling frantically.... I'm busy doing KDE 3.2.3 right now, with prelinking turned on in make.conf and will slowly be doing that to all the other programs. I don't know how to check for DMA I must admit, so if anybody could let me know the c/line for that it might be worth a try as well.
Just thinking too that only 256 meg DDR Ram might not be too useful either.

Grayman

Carlo · Post by **Carlo** » Sat Jul 03, 2004 11:40 pm

wrc1944 wrote:Here's a thread you might find interesting about kde "bloat," where you use a DO_NOT_COMPILE= option with emerge, and can cut a lot of things you never use out of kde. I've not tried it, but am really tempted to do so next time I compile kde.

I think spreading this "tip" is not a good idea. DO_NOT_COMPILE can break dependencies resulting in useless bug reports

Grayman: Search for "kde /etc/hosts slow".

wrc1944 · Post by **wrc1944** » Sun Jul 04, 2004 4:15 am

Carlo,
You make a good point, and it certainly would be a good idea to add a caveat about possible dependency problems, and not to report a "bug" if something is amiss.

On the other hand, I see no reason to withhold knowledge about a useful option, one that applied with a little common sense can be used to great advantage, for some users, under certain circumstances. Isn't the main attraction about Gentoo the ability to customize and compile things as one sees fit? I would also think most people running Gentoo know something about what they are doing, and can make their own judgements about what options they wish to try, for whatever reason.

BTW, I forgot, I had previously used this tip with Mozilla and KDE, and had no problems whatsoever. I reviewed the KDE documentation first, and used common sense.

I would also mention that the faster one's machine is, the less effect using DO_NOT_COMPILE= will have, and a point is reached where it makes no realistic difference at all. But again, that's something everyone can judge for themselves, on their own systems.

wrc1944

Jinidog · Post by **Jinidog** » Sun Jul 04, 2004 8:23 am

256 MB is in fact a little bit low, when you are compiling two programs at the same time and want to have a fast reacting system.
It's possible that the systems needs to load data from the swap or from the harddisk when you open a menu.

But I think another kernel could help.
Which kernel are you using?

you can check DMA by typing in "hdparm -i /dev/hda".
It print's out the possible DMA modes and marks the one used with an *

Grayman · Post by **Grayman** » Sun Jul 04, 2004 8:29 am

Hi Carlo

what does - Search for "kde /etc/hosts slow" - do ?

Cheers

Grayman

PS: tried: locate kde /etc/hosts slow

Got a long list of stuff - didn't mean much to me

ralph · Post by **ralph** » Sun Jul 04, 2004 9:08 am

He means you should search this forum.

If /etc/hosts isn't configured right kde can be very slow.

Grayman · Post by **Grayman** » Sun Jul 04, 2004 10:45 pm

Hi, dma is on

bash-2.05b# hdparm -i /dev/hda

/dev/hda:

Model=WDC WD600AB-00CBA1, FwRev=04.07B04, SerialNo=WD-WMAA51271924
Config={ HardSect NotMFM HdSw>15uSec SpinMotCtl Fixed DTR>5Mbs FmtGapReq }
RawCHS=16383/16/63, TrkSize=57600, SectSize=600, ECCbytes=40
BuffType=DualPortCache, BuffSize=2048kB, MaxMultSect=16, MultSect=16
CurCHS=16383/16/63, CurSects=16514064, LBA=yes, LBAsects=117231408
IORDY=on/off, tPIO={min:120,w/IORDY:120}, tDMA={min:120,rec:120}
PIO modes: pio0 pio1 pio2 pio3 pio4
DMA modes: mdma0 mdma1 mdma2
UDMA modes: udma0 udma1 udma2 udma3 udma4 *udma5
AdvancedPM=no WriteCache=enabled
Drive conforms to: device does not report version:

* signifies the current active mode

and my kernel is gentoo-dev-siurces 2.6.5-r1

Cheers - Grayman

Grayman · Post by **Grayman** » Sun Jul 04, 2004 10:49 pm

BTW this is my /etc/hosts file

127.0.0.1 localhost tux
# IPV6 versions of localhost and co
::1 ip6-localhost ip6-loopback
fe00::0 ip6-localnet
ff00::0 ip6-mcastprefix
ff02::1 ip6-allnodes
ff02::2 ip6-allrouters
ff02::3 ip6-allhosts

Not a lot in it - maybe that's where I screwed up.

OK I gotta go to bed now - nearly 1 am here and I have work tomorrow/today (!!??)

Thanks for info so far

Grayman

cromulent413 · Post by **cromulent413** » Mon Nov 20, 2006 9:34 pm

I installed a nice, near bare-bones KDE environment with the split e-build, via:

Code: Select all

# emerge kdebase-startkde

... and it installed less-than 30 software packages, as opposed to the more-than 200 packages that a kde-meta installation would have installed. After that, I installed a few other KDE packages that I needed, and the final outcome was a nice, lean KDE installation that starts up fast, and is very responsive. And best of all, it only has the stuff that I need / want included in it.

KDE is kind of cool that way, it has its base system if you will, that runs just fine if it and only it is installed, and then you can install other KDE-specific programs and services on top of it that do various things. The more stuff KDE has going on though, the more system resources KDE as a whole will use. Me, I like a nice small installation with only the things that I need in it, no reason for the windowing interface to be doing things in the background that you don't need it to be doing.
I advise that you first look over your "USE" flags, and the other information as a whole in your /etc/make.conf file and make sure it's using the optimisations you want, and then do a KDE base installation using the split e-builds, and then go about the business of installing the individual KDE apps you wish to use.

[bold]CAVEATS:[/bold]

Installing KDE via split e-builds takes a long, long, long time, even the minimal 'startkde' option. Be prepaired for that. Also, you will have to search out and install other KDE programs individually, which takes lots of time and effort as well. For instance, after I got KDE up and running via the method I outlined above, I couldn't watch DVD's in Kaffeine. I had to emerge 'kdemultimedia-meta' in order to be able to watch DVD's. I also had to install 'arts' seperately, for listening to mp3's and vorbis, and the accessibility and kdeartwork packages ... Things of that nature. It took me an entire afternoon to do it all, but it paid off in spades because my KDE environment isn't bloated, and it's not running all sorts of crap in the background that I don't want / need / use/ ... and I had plenty of beer to drink while it was grinding away compiling the packages so that helped too LOL

Good luck!

vorgas · Post by **vorgas** » Tue Nov 21, 2006 5:25 am

You can enable the kdehiddenvisibility USE flag and re-emerge kde (kde-meta, whatever). Between that and prelinking, my kde performance really jumped off. Also, you mentioned a lot of programs that aren't kde based. These will take time to start up. I prefer using kde native versions. Especially since you can set konqueror to preload one instance and always keep one loaded. I use koffice instead of open office. xmms has been discontinued; amarok is a more-than-stellar replacement. Krita is a decent replacement for the gimp, unless you just do loads and loads of graphics work. Remember that when you load a gnome/gtk app, it's got to pull up all those libraries, start up bonobo/corba, etc.

You may want to check and make sure you aren't running any services you don't need. Use 'rc-status boot' and 'rc-status default' to make sure you aren't starting up xinetd services you don't need, samba if you aren't using it,
etc, etc.

Finally, there are a couple things you should verify. Be sure to check out the memory usage of a process, not just the cpu hit. Do you have enough swap and is it enabled in your fstab? DMA was mentioned earlier, and there are
several other options that provide a slight performance advantage with hdparm (-a256A1c1d1m16). Make sure hdparm is being started in your boot runlevel and that your options are in /etc/conf.d/hdparm. If your kernel has the options, make sure you have the low-latency options set in Processor Type and Features (SMT (Hyperthreading), Preemption Model, Preempt The Big Kernel Lock).

Can I speed up KDE ?

Can I speed up KDE ?

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