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kde 4 performance
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+1 to this. I have Asus EEE PC 901 and few weeks ago I finally install kubuntu 9.04 on it - (efore I used EasyPeasy with UNR). It was functional but not very responsive setup. And it was Intel to blame for. After some googling I found this manual: HOWTO: Jaunty Intel Graphics Performance Guide My choice is Optimal Configuration with kernel 2.6.30rc7 for WiFi from the box. The result is worth the efforts, speed improvement is eye-visible. But be prepared for possible troubles and bugs.
kubuntu 10.04 AMD64 - KDE 4.4
AMD - radeonHD - M-Audio revolution 5.1 |
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ash, could you give some clear benchmarks? it's hard for me to think of one, but try. Maybe you could find a script to move windows and click around, something. I don't see the slowness, but let's say I have a fairly modern processor. The only things clearly slower are the file operations, both deleting and copying are rather KDE speed bound than disk bound; the same is true for Dolphin showing big directories. These may get optimized some day. Otherwise, I think the difference between light and heavy distros to be all BS, and I don't speak totally without experience. |
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i am speaking here about the responsiveness feeling of kde when using the computer. stuff like waiting to kde to react to mouse clicks or to redraw an area of the screen
if you want to see what i am about get a pentium 4 with 512 ram and try it yourself (kde 4 vs kde 3 on the same box). i wrote estimated delays earlier in this thread but i dont have way to measure it here are some things to point out the bad performance is on all single core boxes i tried (my pentium 4 3.00 ghz 512 ram / celeron 4 2.60 ghz 512 ram / 5 other boxes with lower specs / friend's amd athlon 3200+ 1024 ram running linux 32bit). dual cores seem to not have this issue kde 4 performance may go up and down depending on video card and xorg settings (using vesa / proper driver with composite enable / disable and various glx / dri settings). kde 3 performance on the same computer is affected to a much lower extent. in most boxes the worst performance of kde 3 is better than the best of kde 4. (tried boxes with intel 810 865 915 945 / sis 662fx / 3dfx voodoo 3 / nvidia gf 2 mx400 with nv and nvidia drivers / some ati pci-e card with fglrx) kde 4 apps work slow when run in kde 3 and kde 3 apps work faster than kde 4 apps when run in kde 4 closing plasma does not help much if at all changing kde 4 widget style does not help much all tests with nepomuk and strigi disabled all tests with naked and oxygen plasma themes examples of places with bad performance in the beginning of this thread
Last edited by ash on Fri Jun 05, 2009 10:19 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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I've a pentum 4 with 512 MB of ram too.
With desktop effects disabled everything works like a charm; with effects enabled instead i have the same performance problem. Maybe it's all fault of my old graphic card (nvia geforce MX440), but in GNOME compiz gives me a feeling of better responsiveness. I don't know; maybe it's a problem of nvidia driver regression. |
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Hi mates,
I'm also suffering from this overall slowness in KDE4 everyone is talking about. However, I think the whole issue has to do mainly with Qt4 and, in a lesser extend, with KDE4 too. Both are quite new and their codes need some optimization effort to get mature. :undecided: Last day I did a quite curious (and useful?) test: simple moved my mouse pointer very fast on my desktop and watched in system monitor how the CPU graph went up by 15% or so. Then I stopped moving the mouse and the CPU graph went back down by that percentage. I repeated the same process several times and, afterwards, I could clearly see the parts of the graph where I was simply moving my mouse and those where it was idle. :-O As you might be thinking, like I do, this is inacceptable and it's a clear evidence that the drawing subsystem it's quite deficient and should be greatly improved. The big problem, in my humble opinion, is when some screen area must be repainted it uses too much CPU causing that overall performance penalty that everyone is complaining about. I have also noticed that apps like Opera, my favourite browser, work considerably slower than if I use them on another graphic manager like LXDE or so. That's why I'm quite disagree with the idea of pointing to the graphic drivers as the culprits of this story. Moreover, how could be possible that ALL absolutely ALL drivers from different manufactures were performing so bad. Why don't they do so in Gnome or XFCE? It simply makes no sense to me to think that the performance problems KDE4 is suffering are due to graphic drivers. So if any KDE guru read this, please, consider this words and let us know both whether I'm right and what can be done to sort it out. Best regards!  PS: My box specs: AMD Thunderbird 1.2 GHz 768 DDR RAM ATi 8500 LE 64MB (glxgear gives around 2.200~2.300 FPs) |
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If you really meant 15 percent, well, it's hard to say. However, if we're talking about percentage points, I can't reproduce it here. Quickly moving my mouse pointer doesn't make a noticeable difference in terms of CPU usage (Nvidia GeForce FX 5200).
I'm not a KDE guru, but here's one.
Problem solved? Please click on "Accept this answer" below the post with the best answer to mark your topic as solved.
10 things you might want to do in KDE | Open menu with Super key | Mouse shortcuts |
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Yes, I know it sounds too hard, but I meant 15 percent, ie, if my CPU is using 10% of total CPU usage, when moving my mouse quickly it goes up to 25% or so. :-O What are your box specs?
Thanks for the link. As you can read at the end of it, it says what I have suggested that the Qt4 painting engine seems not to work too well, mainly being due to not exploiting some hardware acceleration features, thus doing these tasks by software which needs a lot of CPU. I hope this changes soon, because it's spoilting the feeling on KDE4. Does anyone have fresh news about this issue? Any improvement? Regards.
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I have read the examples, but nothing applies to me (except Konqueror browsing, but on Linux, only Opera doesn't blow at rendering). I would suggest expand your description of slowness, put it in a few bug reports and post the links here; if you have time also put a video comparison (that's hard, running any capture program on Linux instantly makes the desktop 5 times slower).
Last edited by alecs1 on Sat Jun 06, 2009 8:12 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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cpu use depends much on what the mouse is moving over. i guess it will kick cpu higher in plasma than in kwrite for instance
you all can go to desktop effects and enable one called show paint. when using kde color changes in the areas as they redraw now start using the computer and see how much is redrawn (possibly few successive times which we dont see). some of the redrawn areas are unchanged at all. as extreme example zoom out (in the plasma menu in top right) and see the cpu meter each fade or sliding effect (like the ones built into stuff - not the composite window effects) use redraw multiple times. i looked in the source of polyester ui theme and saw use of alpha bit transparency calculations everywhere including where its not really needed (when alpha is fixed 0 or 255). there is no performance difference between polyester and other useable themes so i guess its the same in all of them what else can load cpu on simple tasks ? any1 tried kde 4 on other operating systems on the same box ? (i dont have windows or mac to test) video compare - well i can put 2 monitors side by side and shoot with a digital camera (not perfect cause boxes are different but i can swap roles and show in both directions)
Last edited by ash on Mon Jun 08, 2009 3:49 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Hi guys,
I have good news. After reading the next two articles: - http://userbase.kde.org/GPU-Performance - http://tsdgeos.blogspot.com/2007/10/per ... ivers.html I have got to greatly improve my graphic card performance (ATi Radeon 8500). Now everything works much snappier and fluently ....and I love it! I was using EXA accelation method with most common options, but the next three ones:
the last option was the one that did especially make the difference. So I encourage you all to give it a try. I hope it helps some of you. Best regards! PS: Next you have my xorg.conf file fully just in case it can be helpful:
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with desktop effects disabled do your new settings work faster than vesa driver ?
than the basic settings with minimal or no accel` ? |
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I have desktop effects disabled. With vesa driver my graphic card didn't work too well the last time I tried. Now I have something that for the very first time I can tell is "usable". I haven't tried desktop effects yet, but I don't think it deserves the effort. My graphic card is working fast enough to say it's usable, but it is not superfast at all. So using desktop effects it's expected to reduce the current performance and I'm not willing to. Regards. |
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are your moments of slowness same as mine ?
(what i described here is about the same on 7 different boxes) |
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Hi Ash,
well, I have experienced much of the problems you have described along this thread. With the last changes I have done to my xorg.conf file, I have achieved to improve the overall speed feeling. However, as I have said several times already, it still needs to improve a bit more. This means that these changes have considerably reduced the performance problems but more must be done. I'll keep looking into it and, if it happens I find out anything else, take for granted I will share it with you all. Regards!
Last edited by Musikolo on Tue Jun 09, 2009 11:05 am, edited 1 time in total.
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