How to speed up KDE

[correctclick]

Hi. I've been enjoying KDE 3 on my new gentoo system for a couple of weeks now, and I am very pleased.

My only complaint is that KDE is a bit slow. For example, it takes about 7 seconds to open up Konqueror. If I click on my home directory on the desktop, I wait about 15 seconds before anything appears. Kate takes about 6 seconds to open. Other than opening programs, the system seems quite responsive.

I'm using an Athlon XP 1700+ processor with 512 mg DDR ram, decent video card, etc. IE takes less than a second to open on windows.

Is something misconfigured? Is this normal? What can I do to speed up KDE? Is there a particular theme or configuration that speeds things up?

I am willing to sacrafice eye candy to make things run faster. Ideally, I would like to use a simple, spartan, lightening-fast GUI. What can I do to make this happen?

Thanks a lot for any help.

[sideburn-auto]

hello,

kde is very slow when compiled with gcc 2.95. I beleive it's a problem with the linker. However, i recently installed gentoo 1.3b and i got a massive speed boost in kde, with most eye candy turned on.

if youre feeling brave and have a lot of time on your hands go ahead and try 1.3b, it includes gcc 3.1 and binutils 2.12 (as opposed to gcc 2.95 and binutils 2.11 in gentoo 1.2)

note that it's not a stable release so some programs may not work, most notably, flash doesnt work in konqueror due to binary incompatability with gcc 2.95.

good luck,
rich

[Sykus]

also, a nice thread in the tips n tricks forum:

https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?t=3209

[enesideme]

kde is not so slow even when compiled with gcc2.95.3.
you don't give your flags. I have always built kde with -march=i686(with gcc2.95.3) or -march=athlon-tbird(with gcc3.1) + -O3 -pipe fomit-frame-pointer -funroll-loops. I just have a duron 800 + 512mo sdram and it takes 1 or 2 seconds to launch konqueror. But whatever your flags it should not make such a difference.

[aardvark]

Check out the Tips 'n trcks section in the forum. There may be a good answer there

[Sykus]

[trythil]

For GCC 3.1:

Intel x86 optimizations
http://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc-3.1/gcc/i386-and-x86-64-Options.html#i386%20and%20x86-64%20Options

General optimizer parameters
http://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc-3.1/gcc/Optimize-Options.html#Optimize%20Options

For GCC 2.95:
http://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc-2.95.3/gcc_2.html#SEC31
http://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc-2.95.3/gcc_2.html#SEC10

Generally, though, you shouldn't attempt the more obscure flags unless you really know what you're doing.

[Sykus]

thanks! /me proceeds to edumacate myself

[neuron]

sounds to me like your running your hd without dma

hdparm /dev/hdX

and updating to gcc3.1 is very profitable with a athlon xp