An Analysis of KDE Memory Usage

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An Analysis of KDE Memory Usage

Posted by Lubos Lunak on Thursday 20/Sep/2001, @04:03
from the optimize-em-all dept.
I was recently hired by SuSE to focus on optimizing KDE, and as part of my work, I have written an analysis of KDE memory usage based on Waldo Bastian's previous paper concerning GNU/Linux linker issues and KDE startup-performance. As it turns out, the linker issues examined by Waldo do indeed have an effect on the memory usage of C++ applications compiled and linked under GNU/Linux. The most important number from this paper: About 650KB of memory wasted per KDE application not launched via KDE Init. I have contacted the GCC/binutils developers with this information along with some suggestions, and there has already been one response from Jakub Jelinek (of Red Hat), developer of the prelinker tool. Another mail has been sent to kde-core-devel with a suggestion as to how we could probably deal with the issue until a full GCC/binutils-based solution is available.

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Over 40 comments listed. Printing out index only.

Non-GNU users
by Loranga on Thursday 20/Sep/2001, @04:55

How will this affect us non-GNU users? We who don't use GNU ld, binutils, glibc and so on. Will anything be done to increase speed/decrease memory usage for non-GNU platforms? Will objprelink be available for Sparc?

Lots of questions :) Hope you don't mind if a question is a little bit stupid, I don't have that much technical knowledge.

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Re: Non-GNU users by Evan "JabberWokky" E. on Thursday 20/Sep/2001, @08:43

Re: Non-GNU users by Loranga on Friday 21/Sep/2001, @00:32

Re: Non-GNU users by Sage on Friday 21/Sep/2001, @01:58

Re: Non-GNU users by Loranga on Friday 21/Sep/2001, @04:44

Re: Non-GNU users by not me on Friday 21/Sep/2001, @10:31
Re: Non-GNU users by Evan "JabberWokky" E. on Friday 21/Sep/2001, @15:33

Re: Non-GNU users by Loranga on Saturday 22/Sep/2001, @05:45

Re: Non-GNU users by Evan "JabberWokky" E. on Saturday 22/Sep/2001, @14:02

Re: Non-GNU users by Loranga on Sunday 23/Sep/2001, @02:24

clarify by Loranga on Sunday 23/Sep/2001, @02:46

Re: Non-GNU users by Lubos Lunak on Thursday 20/Sep/2001, @11:46

What os/kernel?
by Erik Hensema on Thursday 20/Sep/2001, @05:13

What kernel did you use to test test this? Linux 2.4.x is notorious for reporting wrong values for SHARED. Rik van Riel seems to be working on a patch which will solve this (and many, many other) problems but AFIAK it isn't merged yet.

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Re: What os/kernel? by Jonathan Brugge on Thursday 20/Sep/2001, @05:58
Re: What os/kernel? by JSL on Thursday 20/Sep/2001, @09:42

Re: What os/kernel? by Erik Hensema on Thursday 20/Sep/2001, @11:33

Re: What os/kernel? by Lubos Lunak on Thursday 20/Sep/2001, @11:34

check memory on solaris or HP-UX but NOT linux
by john jones on Thursday 20/Sep/2001, @06:28

please check the memory results on solaris or HP-UX before going ahead with this mainly because I dont completely trust linux to report the right results.
(would you want more than one judge in a race ?)

there are free tools from both SUN and HP to do this and GCC is supported on both platforms

regards

john jones

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Re: check memory on solaris or HP-UX but NOT linux by Chad Kitching on Thursday 20/Sep/2001, @21:34

Alternatives?
by NO on Thursday 20/Sep/2001, @06:37

So for us linux (and other gnu) users this seems like a problem with
gcc and the linker.
Are there any alternativ compiler linker and ld.so that can be used
on Linux ?

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Re: Alternatives? by Tim Jansen on Thursday 20/Sep/2001, @11:53

Re: Alternatives? by Birger Langkjer on Friday 21/Sep/2001, @05:33

Re: Alternatives? by not me on Friday 21/Sep/2001, @10:34

Re: Alternatives? by ac on Friday 21/Sep/2001, @12:48

Re: Alternatives? by not me on Friday 21/Sep/2001, @18:58

So whats the problem
by minty on Thursday 20/Sep/2001, @11:23

From a users point of view, I dont see what whats the big deal with 650 KB wasted per application. Anyone with a system configued with only little memory woud not be using KDE in the first place, they'd be using a more Spartin window manager or none at all right. I rather the focus be on maximizing speed instead of maximizing memory usage. Perhaps the two are correlated,I don't know, just my thoughts as a KDE user, and a guy with 512 Megs of RAM

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Re: So whats the problem by renaud on Thursday 20/Sep/2001, @11:33
Re: So whats the problem by Stefan Heimers on Thursday 20/Sep/2001, @13:52
70% of PC users are using obsolete machines by Amazed of London on Friday 21/Sep/2001, @03:13

Re: 70% of PC users are using obsolete machines by illya_the_great on Friday 21/Sep/2001, @03:37

Re: 70% of PC users are using obsolete machines by Amazed of London on Friday 21/Sep/2001, @08:39

Re: 70% of PC users are using obsolete machines by Yama on Friday 21/Sep/2001, @08:25

Re: 70% of PC users are using obsolete machines by Amazed of London on Friday 21/Sep/2001, @08:58
Re: 70% of PC users are using obsolete machines by Amazed of London on Friday 21/Sep/2001, @08:59

Re: 70% of PC users are using obsolete machines by Yama on Friday 21/Sep/2001, @09:15

Re: So whats the problem by Androgynous Howard on Friday 21/Sep/2001, @09:38

Re: So whats the problem by JSL on Saturday 22/Sep/2001, @01:35

Re: So whats the problem by Ralf on Saturday 22/Sep/2001, @14:15
Re: So whats the problem by James Pole on Saturday 22/Sep/2001, @16:53
Re: So whats the problem by Elton Wade on Sunday 23/Sep/2001, @10:14

Re: So whats the problem by someone on Sunday 23/Sep/2001, @23:58

SuSE is hiring!
by ac on Thursday 20/Sep/2001, @11:25

Nice to hear that SuSE is still hiring people to do innovative things.
Hopefully it will make KDE3 a little bit snappier ( there isnt a lot left
to improve judging from Win2ks speed )

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Other optimizing tips
by Stefan Heimers on Thursday 20/Sep/2001, @13:59

You might also want to look at this page:

http://www.kosta.ch/~stefanh/speedup/

And I am looking for corrections or additions to these pages.

Bye,
Stefan

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Re: Other optimizing tips by Billy Nopants on Thursday 20/Sep/2001, @16:58

Re: Other optimizing tips by Logan Johnson on Thursday 20/Sep/2001, @20:15
Re: Other optimizing tips by Jon on Friday 21/Sep/2001, @08:12

Re: Other optimizing tips by Carbon on Saturday 22/Sep/2001, @14:25

Re: Other optimizing tips by aleXXX on Friday 21/Sep/2001, @00:02

Re: Other optimizing tips by aleXXX on Friday 21/Sep/2001, @00:06

KDE memory & cpu usage
by Herv� PARISSI on Friday 21/Sep/2001, @01:44

It doesn't require that much to discover that KDE works badly with 64MB of RAM ! Windows 2000 works better than Linux/KDE on a Pentium 200 Mhz with 64MB of RAM !
The main points that should be addressed (both for a whole Linux distro and KDE) are really memory usage and speed, unless people won't start using Linux/BSD instead of crappy Windows.

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Re: KDE memory & cpu usage by Stefan Heimers on Friday 21/Sep/2001, @05:05

Re: KDE memory & cpu usage by Iuri Fiedoruk on Tuesday 25/Sep/2001, @11:04

Re: KDE memory & cpu usage by Mark Berry on Tuesday 02/Oct/2001, @11:16

Re: KDE memory & cpu usage by ealm on Friday 21/Sep/2001, @08:20
Re: KDE memory & cpu usage by Alexey Kotovich on Wednesday 26/Sep/2001, @11:02
Re: KDE memory & cpu usage by Alexey Kotovich on Wednesday 26/Sep/2001, @11:02

So, how long till we see a real solution?
by Simon on Friday 21/Sep/2001, @11:14

As the title says, approxiately how long until we will see a proper solution to the problem? Are we talking months? years? what? How long will it take to fix/optimise gcc and the linker?

--
Simon

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