In my opinion, I think that KDE consumes quite RAM, because I have 1gb then plasma is using 138mb and kwin 56mb plus the use by other applications (firefox, emesene, amarok, and a large etc.). It's an average of 700mb!!, that is the 70% of total RAM. It's not good ..
anyway sometimes KDe doesn't consumes much ram.

total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 1008 899 108 0 25 565
-/+ buffers/cache: 308 699
Swap: 1027 0 1027

By the way, the computer items aren't cheaps in Argentina, It isn't easy buy RAM when it's necesary.

by

PoL666 wrote:In my opinion, I think that KDE consumes quite RAM, because I have 1gb then plasma is using 138mb and kwin 56mb plus the use by other applications (firefox, emesene, amarok, and a large etc.). It's an average of 700mb!!, that is the 70% of total RAM. It's not good ..
anyway sometimes KDe doesn't consumes much ram.

total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 1008 899 108 0 25 565
-/+ buffers/cache: 308 699
Swap: 1027 0 1027

By the way, the computer items aren't cheaps in Argentina, It isn't easy buy RAM when it's necesary.

by

I just ran free and I was surprised. I always thought that my KDE consumes around 500MB RAM but free says otherwise

Code: Select all

:
              total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:       2072848    2003444      69404          0     160404    1146164
-/+ buffers/cache:     696876    1375972
Swap:      5365628         56    5365572


But if I sum up the RAM consumption figures in System Activity I get cca 500MB. How did it come to such discrepancy??

While I get the whole 'I want KDE to run on my 486DX4 with 48MB of ram', there are a few things to consider.

KDE 3.x works very well on old machines. KDE 4.x, by default, (arguably) doesn't. From these statements, you can't reach the conclusion that KDE 4.x is slower.

KDE 4.x has many more features than KDE 3.x. If you disable (as in skip to compile, for example) strigi, nepomuk, composite support for kwin, disable the GUI animations, use a decoration/widget style that has less gradients and glows than Oxygen, disable most runners in KRunner, you will get a DE faster than KDE 3.5.x was (or, at least, comparably fast).

Every feature needs some system power. The more features, the more system requirements. It is as simple as that.

With that said, when I mentioned AMD Geode 500MHz based system with 128MB of RAM, the only thing I did to KDE to make it run reasonably fast was to remove the metadata stack (strigi and nepomuk).

KDE4 with less features would be something like Antico...

http://www.qt-apps.org/content/show.php ... tent=93778

Primoz wrote:So I conclude that KDE is lightweight, but it could be even lighter.
But the question is: can it use less than 64MB while "idle" like while surfing the net (I measured the RAM while surfing with Firefox).

No, I can tell you that the Firefox itself needs more than 64M memory to have a reasonable speed.

We've setup an embedded system which runs almost nothing else but FIrefox, at 64MB the Firefox simply have a horrible performance. We increase the system memory to 96MB and the performance improves a little and become more or less usable, but still not ideal.

We'd never suceed in building a system which runs Firefox at a satisfactory speed with 64M RAM. However, for Konquer KDE3, 64M is enough and Konqueror flies on it.

Firefox is resource hog, if you leave 128 for KDE4, add at least 96MB to that if you need Firefox. ---- you may see that Firefox isn't using that much memory, but without that amount of memory your firefox cannot fly. ---- Using Konqueror is a lot better if you have low resource.

pansz wrote:

Primoz wrote:So I conclude that KDE is lightweight, but it could be even lighter.
But the question is: can it use less than 64MB while "idle" like while surfing the net (I measured the RAM while surfing with Firefox).

No, I can tell you that the Firefox itself needs more than 64M memory to have a reasonable speed.

We've setup an embedded system which runs almost nothing else but FIrefox, at 64MB the Firefox simply have a horrible performance. We increase the system memory to 96MB and the performance improves a little and become more or less usable, but still not ideal.

We'd never suceed in building a system which runs Firefox at a satisfactory speed with 64M RAM. However, for Konquer KDE3, 64M is enough and Konqueror flies on it.

Firefox is resource hog, if you leave 128 for KDE4, add at least 96MB to that if you need Firefox. ---- you may see that Firefox isn't using that much memory, but without that amount of memory your firefox cannot fly. ---- Using Konqueror is a lot better if you have low resource.

I agree, but I'm just too accustomed to Firefox. I never seriously tried Opera and Konqueror has it's problems, but if Konqueror gets a spell-check while you type, I'll use it. I can't stand not knowing how many mistakes I made while typing in foreign language...
And about Ivans post: I guess it's true a modern desktop enviroment just cant be run on an really old machine.
Even though I was suprised when my Windows XP worked nicely on 400mHz processor and 215MB. Even Arch with KDE4 had more problems with it. But I didn't do any extensive use of any of this OSes, so I can't really say. And I can't really test it no more as I de-constructed that computer...

I believe as long as you set your KDE language correctly, then Konqueror has inbuilt spell check. You may need to install extra packages, or enable it in Konqueror's configuration however.

Primoz wrote:I agree, but I'm just too accustomed to Firefox. I never seriously tried Opera and Konqueror has it's problems, but if Konqueror gets a spell-check while you type, I'll use it. I can't stand not knowing how many mistakes I made while typing in foreign language...

Konqueror has built-in spell-check but you need to configure for it. I use kubuntu and by default the spell check is not enabled.

Janne wrote:My advice would be to invest few bucks and buy more RAM . RAM is dirt-cheap these days.

Doesn't sound to be a good practice, KDE4 cannot fly in my computers with 2G and 4G memories. and I'm seeing my memory isn't used more than half, obviously memory is not the bottle neck for KDE4 performance.

The fact is KDE4 still feels slower for most users, try open krunner in kde4 and type konsole, see how slow the icon of konsole displays (I would call it "sluggish"). and try open katapult in kde3 and type konsole, see how fast the icon of konsole displays (I would call it "instantly"). katapult is blazing fast even in Pentium 3. While I don't understand how can a simply runner become so sluggish even in a reasonably new computer.

Probably Qt4 is eating more CPU and more memory without doing much more stuffs. So sad anyway. I hope Qt 4.5 or Qt 4.6 will address these issues, which seems to be unlikely, our embedded systems show that Qt4's performance is far behind Qt3's.

It is probably more related to the more newer paths KDE and Qt are using. ARGB Visuals for instance. These are way more complicated to render, require more memory, which is what you are experiencing.

In addition KDE 4 pushes the boundary further by using SVG's and 3D Rendering. As a whole it is stressing the whole underlying system.

bcooksley wrote:It is probably more related to the more newer paths KDE and Qt are using. ARGB Visuals for instance. These are way more complicated to render, require more memory, which is what you are experiencing.

In addition KDE 4 pushes the boundary further by using SVG's and 3D Rendering. As a whole it is stressing the whole underlying system.

ARGB might be the reason, SVG's not, actually the svg rendering engine in Qt4 is faster than that of Qt3. I see very good performance of new KDE4 svg-based kdegames in P3 667MHz+256MB systems.

When I've got some spare time I'll check the performance when ARGB disabled, hope that will be the cure of all.

Hans wrote:If you find Plasma to be sluggish you can try this tip.

I just tried this tip, which switches off the ARGB visuals. But now the icons in the system tray are gone. Maybe it would be a solution to tweak KDE in this way, but then non-ARGB icons must be provided, too.

melkart wrote:

Hans wrote:If you find Plasma to be sluggish you can try this tip.

I just tried this tip, which switches off the ARGB visuals. But now the icons in the system tray are gone. Maybe it would be a solution to tweak KDE in this way, but then non-ARGB icons must be provided, too.

I think that that's up to plasma theme creator to provide opaque theme for theme.
Try another them or even better restarting your desktop. Maybe then it will work.
If that doesn't work then I guess that's a bug.

Take in care this, KDE4 provides a very nice environment with many many features and things as Solid, Plasma, etc, this take RAM, it just uses what it needs to use, since KDE4 is really optimized, and will be more with the time, is just 4.2 heh, 3.5 is flying because it is very polished, as kde4 will in some time.