When it comes to CPU-bound tasks, the 2.6 kernel has done a lot to improve
responsiveness for users. If you haven't already tried it, I heartily
recommend it, or a distro such as Mandrake 9.2, which has a lot of
backported patches and specialised tweaks.
The difference I found between Mandrake 9.1 and 9.2 was very marked in terms
of responsiveness on the same machine, and the 2.6 kernel made it even
faster.
KDE 3.2 also improves speed in a number of areas, so you might want to try
that too. If you have a decent video card, from nVidia or ATi, then it is
useful to install their drivers, too. This will boost graphical activities
quite a bit, especially redrawing when activating menus and moving windows.
I personally recommend the Mandrake 10 betas and RCs. They are really going
rather well, and you will see other distros picking up 2.6+KDE 3.2 shortly
as well, improving those CPU-bound activities.
-Luke
----- Original Message -----
From: "Trevor Smith" <trevor@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: <kde@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Tuesday, February 24, 2004 8:59 PM
Subject: Re: how to make KDE faster?
> On February 20, 2004 12:38 pm, Alexander H.M. Ruoff wrote:
> > I have to agree, I use a PIII 450 with 128 MB and KDE is compared to W2K
> > really snappy and extremely stable. Same experience with my Laptop, a
>
> The common claim of everyone who has said "KDE is faster than Win2k on
[my]
> machine" is that they are all (correct me if I'm wrong) using less than
256
> meg of RAM. Maybe 128 meg or less.
>
> As I may have mentioned, when I had only 128 meg of RAM, Win2k was a
MASSIVE
> PIG. It thrashed and ground the hard drive constantly. I'm not sure how
KDE
> would have compared, but it's entirely possible it would have been faster.
>
> HOWEVER, I am not referring in any way, on either system, to hard drive
access
> slowing things down. Since I have upgraded my system to 384 meg of RAM,
Win2k
> is lightning fast -- there is not even a second of swapping to slow things
> down. The same applies to KDE (no swapping to slow things down).
>
> But, with the 384 meg, simple, PROCESSOR-BASED (?) tasks like
opening/drawing
> windows takes a noticeable delay on KDE while there is no delay on Win2k.
> This is NOT a function of how many icons are in a folder or anything like
> that. Things that do not require significant hard drive reading just open
> instanteously on Win2k for me and take 2 - 4 seconds to do so in KDE.
>
> --
> Trevor Smith | trevor@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> ___________________________________________________
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