I've been to the "speed up kde" site, and kde is still just sluggish. Athlon XP-M 2800+ laptop, 512 meg ram, some sort of ATI Radeon graphics card, all the animations and eyecandy for kde turned off, and I can STILL visibly witness the repainting of window elements (it's fast, but visible). IMO, a window should reappear (when maximizing after hidden, for example) instantly and as a single unit.
It takes 2+ seconds to load a konsole window (after it's just been closed).
Also, opening a Konqueror window (just my damn home folder!!) takes MINIMUM a full second and you can see the painting of the inner window making things flash and such. Sometimes 3+ seconds. This is NOT time to show previews or anything like that. No F9 side bar is displayed. On Windows, directories of similar size open instantly.
I think that this might be X that is causing the delay.
KDE performance section of the control center says minimize memory usage for file browsing only (recommended) and max # of instances preloaded is 3 (tried it with 0 and 1 as well, same results essentiallly). Also checked Always try to have at least one preloaded instance.You can slightly improve performance by checking: "Always" in the Radio at the top of the KDE Performance KCM.
FYI:
[root@localhost trevor]# hdparm /dev/hda
/dev/hda: multcount = 16 (on) IO_support = 1 (32-bit) unmaskirq = 0 (off) using_dma = 1 (on) keepsettings = 0 (off) readonly = 0 (off) readahead = 256 (on) geometry = 16383/255/63, sectors = 78140160, start = 0 [root@localhost trevor]# hdparm -tT /dev/hda
/dev/hda: Timing buffer-cache reads: 516 MB in 2.00 seconds = 257.78 MB/sec Timing buffered disk reads: 44 MB in 3.08 seconds = 14.28 MB/sec
You can slightly improve your disk performance by increasing: IO_support to 3:
EIDE_32BIT=3
if your hardware supports this. Or don't set it and let the driver set it.
It is also quite possible that your have set the readahead to too large a value. I use only 8 and I have 50% better buffered disk reads.
-- JRT
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