An Analysis of KDE Memory Usage

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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Comments

by Stefan Heimers (not verified)

We all thank Microsoft for ending this miserable situation by introducing Win XP requiring 128MB of RAM. Microsoft is helping KDE becoming faster than Windows ;-)

by Iuri Fiedoruk (not verified)

I don't think it's a good idea thinking this way, it should be avoided.
Gcc and KDE team should work to make programs run fast on humble machines, for humble and poor people.
One of the advantages of Linux/KDE over windows should be a no-need of upgrades each 2 years.
Thinking as microsoft thinks dosen't help.

by Mark Berry (not verified)

no kidding, has microsoft become our teachers?

by ealm (not verified)

are you kidding... just by loading a freshly installed win2k you use 58 mb ram!

..my linux 2.4.8 kernel takes 29 mb with just xf 4.1 and kde 2.2.1 loaded (debian)

of course KDE isn't snappy on 200 MHz though, but win2k isnt either... and that doesn't mean "linux" performs bader... just linux+kde, there are alternatives you know...

by Alexey Kotovich (not verified)

I don't think so. I have got the P200-MMX/64RAM/S3Virge2MB and it
works well with kde2.2.1 under Linux on kernel 2.4.4.
It is true, but I can't imagine myself that Windows2000 could work
in this terms at all :)

by Alexey Kotovich (not verified)

I don't think so. I have got the P200-MMX/64RAM/S3Virge2MB and it
works well with kde2.1 under Linux on kernel 2.4.4.
It is true, but I can't imagine myself that Windows2000 could work
in this terms at all :)

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