As I'm on a laptop, I cannot easily upgrade (Wish the FOSS movement found it's way into hardware somehow...)

Thus, if it's too big to run, I can't run it. Should my apps require it run. Those apps wont run either.

memory on notebooks is easy to upgrade. you dont have to take apart the entire computer

I heard something a few months ago about using flash drives as extra RAM, is that possible?

update - enabled EXA and migration heuristic greedy on viridian. with effects its a tiny bit faster now. without effects its noticably faster but still not flying

Can I imagine 4.3 to be a tad faster? You know, KWin far more effeicant?

As I rather like KMail and the Kontact suite, can Akondi be streamlined?

i just tried installing 4.3 beta 2 and ended up with a mix of 4.2.4 and 4.3 that crashes all the time

currently i am on viridian with kde 3.5.10 and 1.5 G ram. this thing is FAST !!

uptime ~1 hour
screen 1680x1050

open apps
konqueror (6 open tabs + i closed some more earlier)
kopete
ksysguard
klipper (in tray)
knotify (in tray)
kdm (of kde 4) probably somewhere away in the background

application memory 259 MB
cache memory 140 MB
swap memory 0 B

cpu most of the time at ~15 % (does not go lower)
ocassional splashes to not higher than 50 %
very rare splashes to higher than 50 %

top of VmSize (VmRss) column
X 212 M (30 M)
konqueror 108 M (83 M)
kopete 90 M (32 M)
artsd 82 M (24 M)
kicker 40 M (20 M)
knotify 36 M (10 M)
kded 36 M (15 M)
kwin 33 M (14 M)
korgac 32 M (12 M)
ksysguard 32 M (15 M)
kdesktop 31 M (13 M)

top cpu users
X (splashes up to 10 % / 28 %* / 60 %**)
ksysguard (splashes up to 6 %)
konqueror (splashes up to 4 % / 11 %* / 24 %**)
ksysguardd (splashes up to 3 %)

* - when scrolling up and down with mouse wheel this forum page
** - when scrolling up and down with mouse wheel a page with javascript translucency effects

a few posts ago i complained that enabling akonadi server would cause DBus daemon and nepomuk_akonadi to consume an inappropriate amount of CPU power--up to 80%.

now i found that, unknowingly, i had been running the KDE 3 version of akonadi, due to the fact that i have both, KDE 3.5.10 & 4.3, installed on my machine. removing the 3.5 version of akonadi and replacing it with the 4.3 version seems to have solved this problem. (even though i had to ignore a few dependencies, due to some particularities in my setup.)

now akonadi, nepomuk, and strigi are all running peacefully, without consuming more resources than i would expect. i'm still looking for some useful tool to actually use the information collected by nepomuk & strigi, without having to get into writing an interface myself, but that's a different matter...

phani.

I have similar "funny" performance problems with kde4. I run Debian Testing on 2 devices:

1) T60P, 2GB Ram, T2500 dualcore, 2.4 GHz, ATI 5200 with 512MB. Fresh installation of testing with kde4.
2) E8400, 3.00GHz, nVidia GeForce 8800 GTS 512MB, 4GB Ram. Dist-upgrade to kde4.

Both run prorietary drivers from ATI & nVidia. KDE3 is fast responding, as it should be.

Kde4 on the other hand ... all applications fleel like walking through mud. 250ms is the fastest response I get. Wel, I guess one could work with it, but it's no fun.

Some applications (ex.: konsole) eat 100% cpu just for maximizing the window. That freezes the desktop for ~ 1.5 seconds.

I do not know what causes this strange behaviour, but it is a real show stopper. Even when I run fvwm2 and start konsole it takes ~ 1-2 seconds for maximizing.

this means problem is in qt 4 or its behavior

clue - i looked in a source of qt 4 theme (polyester) and its reaally bloated

@ash: Please report such problems to the authors of the Qt styles in question, so they can improve their styles efficiency.

KDE4 is slow on some computers: add more memory does not help, enable/disable kwin effect does not help either. the bottle-neck seems to be CPU, since I noticed the 100% CPU when lag.

I don't know why but I tried lots of combinations, some particular hardware combination may slow down KDE4 a lot! the slow machine may have intel, nv, or ati card, so driver does not seem to be problem. add memory to 4G does not help, so memory is not the problem here, enable/disable kwin effect does no help, so compositing is still not the problem.

where is the problem? most performance problems are at font rendering, screen scroll, window resize etc. Is it really the problem of Qt4? or to say "some hardware combination not compatible with Qt4?" —— all of my computers runs super fast on KDE3, so they should at least work in a reasonable speed in KDE4.

Font Rendering, Screen Scrolling and Window Resizes are all graphics operations, and therefore are problems with the graphics drivers.

I believe a patch that was previously in qt-copy in Qt3 has been added officially in Qt 4.6, which allows windows to not repaint while resizing, which will considerably improve performance with cards that have problems doing this.

the latest driver from nvidia reduced the 100%-cpu flaw for nvidia, but kde4 is still (at best) on half the speed of kde3.5 for all on my tested computers.

KDE 4.3 is definitely flying on my computer, a relatively modest laptop with Intel graphics. 50% performance loss sounds quite a bit exaggerated if you ask me. How did you get that figure?

open kosole on kde3.5 and on kde4. measure the time till it shows up. it's less than 250ms on both (x61s, intel graphics). but on kde3.5 its ~ 100ms. that makes a difference. same on user interactions.