[CLUE-Tech] X-Sever/KDE "tuning"

[Michael J. Hammel]

Thus spoke Randy Arabie
> I like the new KDE "look and feel" however, I'm not at all 
> impressed with the performance.  Things load really slow.  I 
> launch an application and then sit and wait, watch the 
> "spinning disc" icon down on the toolbar, it disappears, then 
> I wait a little longer, and then suddenly my application 
> appears.  The total time varies, but even a simple x-term 
> took 23 seconds to load.
> 
> Does anyone have any tips for improving (tunining) the 
> performance of X or the window manager?  

It's not X, more than likely.  KDE was known to have serious problems with
application startup in KDE 1.x and possibly still in 2.x.  

> My system is an AMD K6II 500 with 256 MB RAM, and 10 GB IDE 
> HD.  The video card I'm using is a S3 ViRGE/DX with 4 MB 
> memory onboard.

Probably irrelevent.  This is new enough hardware that it should never take
23 seconds for an xterm to start.  Note that "xterm" is not the same as the
default terminal window that KDE (or GNOME, for that matter) use.  "xterm"
is a program that predates both desktops and is pretty fast on its own.

> design.  However, my wife had Photoshop 6 on Windoze 2000 and 
> the system handled that fine...shouldn't Linux be able to do 
> it too?

Yep.  Things run fine on some of my older hardware, but I use GNOME now
(used to use FVWM).  The problem may be in older KDE libraries that were on
the 7.1 distribution you installed.  And there lies a problem:  with Red
Hat and KDE you can't easily upgrade the libraries, at least not as easily
as you can using Red Hat and GNOME.  And with GNOME, if you install the
Ximian distribution, it's a *real* breeze to upgrade.  Sometimes too easy -
I recently upgraded the Control Center and found I liked the old one
better, but it's not clear how to backtrack.

Anyway, I think KDE holds much promise, but because upgrading is simpler
with GNOME I use that instead.  KDE needs to align themselves with some
distribution that can make auto-updates much easier.

And back to your problem:  you should check with versions of the KDE
libraries you have installed and make sure you have the latest stable
versions.  I know the KDE development team was discussing 
the problems of slow application startup as recently as September.

-- 
Michael J. Hammel           |
The Graphics Muse           |   I can't remember if I'm the good twin or the
mjhammel at graphics-muse.org  |   evil one.
http://www.graphics-muse.com