Launching apps always seems to have been a bit slow in kde (both kde3 and kde4) especially when launched from a terminal. I always see a lot of info being spit out in the terminal and wonder if the slowness has something to do with this and whether or not this can be turned off (compile option). As far as I know I am not using kde packages with debug turned on.

When compiled in release mode, that output is "warning" output only usually. It is not possible to disable it, and it is not a likely cause of the slowness. I do not know why the applications may start more slowly, unfortunately.

My neither, but there is a marked difference in startup from terminal and from a normal launcher or the menu eventhough normal startup is a little bit slow too on older machines, so I figured it had something to do with all this output maybe it's just normal loading of libraries.

It is possible that more applications ( and their libraries ) have to be kept in memory when launching applications from the terminal, where as less with the user interface.

Cooker or stable releases? or both?

always this is not even a kde4 regression

The only apps that start slow for me are Amarok (which isn't even that slow - the splash screen is up for 5 seconds at most) and Kontact (which I suspect is slow because of the loading of its modules - individual modules, like KMail, start markedly faster). Konqueror, Kopete, Konsole, Gwenview and KOffice apps all start about half a second after I click them, which seems to be a damn-sight faster then Gnome on the same hardware.

Which begs the question - what's the hardware of your machine like?

on my faster computer c2d clicking an an app launches within a second, from terminal about 3 seconds on my slower computer (p4) it takes about 3 secs to launch when clicking, 7-8 secs from a terminal but I wouldnt consider a p4 2.4 GHz particularly slow actually...

Are standard X applications affected by the same slowdown? You can try with applications such as "xterm"

no they're fast

Interesting. Are Qt applications such as Quassel or Psi affected?

quassel is kinda slow but opera and qtconfig are quick, also I have to note subsequent launches are faster, so part of the problem seems to be loading libraries, still launching from the terminal is slower

Unfortunately I do not know why this occurs. It is likely libraries loading, but why KDE applications take longer with the terminal is unknown. It may be related to kDebug / kWarning however, which are part of KDELibs.

it's definitely related to the amount of blurn they spit out in the terminal, kwrite is particularly bad but dragon player a lot faster. I stick with my conclusion the amount of blurb apps spit out makes them proportionally slower and these symptoms are worse when launching from a terminal.

Really you can see it happening, launch app, blurb...blurp....blurp....blurp stops, app apears

You may wish to file a report at bugs.kde.org for this. You may wish to run "kdebugdialog" and disable everything which should reduce that output.