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KDE 4 Uses 40% Less Memory Than 3 Despite Eye-Candy
Posted by
Zonk
on Thursday December 13, @08:37PM
from the optimization-in-action dept.
from the optimization-in-action dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Pro-Linux reports that KDE 4, scheduled to be released in January 2008, consumes almost 40% less memory than KDE 3.5, despite the fact that version 4 of the Free and Open Source desktop system includes a composited window manager and a revamped menu and applet interface. KDE developer Will Stephenson showcased KDE 4's 3D eye-candy on a 256Mb laptop with 1Ghz CPU and run-of-the-mill integrated graphics, pointing out that mini-optimizations haven't even yet been started." Update: 12/14 22:40 GMT by Z : Or, not so much. An anonymous reader writes "The author of the original KDE 3.5 vs KDE 4.0 memory comparison has come out with a more accurate benchmark. In reality, KDE 4.0 uses 110 MB more memory than KDE 3.5.8.
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Firehose:KDE 4 uses 40% less memory despite 3D eye-candy by Anonymous Coward
KDE 4 Uses 40% Less Memory Than 3 Despite Eye-Candy
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Wow. (Score:5, Funny)
Unbloating? (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Wow. (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Wow. (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Wow. (Score:4, Funny)
Actually... (Score:5, Insightful)
I.E.... "here you go gentlemen, the standard system you are able to use is X Ghz, and X Gigabytes of DDR 1600, anything less than that will be obsolete by the first service pack anyways, so get crackin'!!"
Linux people and most of the OSS folks (Unix as well) have been server dedicated systems for a long time, and built on a robust or rather "efficient" (perhaps a better term is "effective"?) platform. As a result, they've been building to extract as many cycles and memory space as possible for use by client applications, not the Host Operating System.
As a result, Microsoft has it in its best interests to PUSH the upgrade cycle. If they can be depended to push the upgrade cycle to keep selling new boxes, the retail computer builders will continue to give Microsoft the plugs and keep shipping their OS as the "default" or "preferred" or "Supported" Operating System for their Big Bad Ass Kicking Rigs (tm).
Re:Actually... (Score:5, Insightful)
As a matter of corporate policy on a high level, Microsoft obviously benefits from and feeds into the upgrade treadmill. I don't think it's hard to believe that there's a quid pro quo with the hardware manufacturers on this; at the very least it's an obvious symbiosis. Microsoft craps out a new OS every few years with vastly increased system requirements (at least in order to run well), and in return the hardware manufacturers continue to bundle Windows. (There's more to the relationship, obviously, such as Microsoft's pricing structure for OEM licenses, but I think the hardware/software upgrade path is a part.)
However, I don't think most of Microsoft's programmers necessarily go into work every day saying to themselves "today, I'm going to build the shittiest, most resource-hogging chunk of code I can, so help me God." I suspect they probably just code for whatever their higher-ups tell them the target platform is going to be. If you're an overworked programmer, and if management makes it obvious that they care more about shoveling in the features than in optimizing code for performance and footprint, you're not going to optimize.
I think that's Windows in a nutshell. Somewhere along the line, some suit decides what the target platform is going to be; at the beginning of the development cycle it's probably pretty top-of-the-line kit. Everything is targeted towards this, and the end result is massive increases in bloat. Optimization is hard and unless you emphasize it and reward it, it's not just going to happen all by itself.
On the OSS side, you see a lot of optimization happen because many developers are working with limited resources and aren't in a position (or have the desire) to go out and buy a faster computer to make some chunk of code run faster. If you write an OSS application that requires your users to go out and buy a new system in order to use it, you've just alienated a lot of potential users -- or, hopefully, created a demand for someone to optimize the code and get it running on existing, slower hardware.
In short, I don't think Windows' footprint and mediocre (or negative) performance gains is due to bad coding as much as it's a direct result of institutional culture. It's a good example of what can happen to any product or project if performance isn't a key consideration, and particularly if it takes a back seat to featuritis.
Re:Actually... (Score:4, Insightful)
XP boots faster, but it's not ready when it displays the desktop, so i always get the hourglass. Notfunny.
KWrite? (Score:5, Interesting)
It would be interesting to see your source about this. The claim on OpenOffice.org Writer may be credible, but KWord (I suppose you meant that by KWrite, since KWrite is a very basic text editor) is way faster and snappier than MS Word (fine, it has also less features and all, but it is faster to load), and I am not going to believe your claim without data to support it.
Not sure about GEdit, but Notepad is almost featureless and has not changed in a decade or so. It has no code highlighting, no handling of different line endings, no support for different encodings, no tab handling, no plugin framework, no multi-file mode, and in fact its only feature is a search feature without regular expressions. Of course it's going to be fast. For that sake "Hello world" is even faster. I do most of my programming in Kate [kate-editor.org] and I am very happy with that. Notepad may be faster, but it does not do what a text editor is supposed to do in order to be useful.
Re:KWrite? (Score:5, Interesting)
...And it doesn't even handle text encodings correctly!
Try this: write "this app can break" (without quotes), or any other text with the same pattern of spaces, in an otherwise-blank file, save it, and then reopen it. It'll show up as unprintable characters because that's (apparently) the magic sequence to switch Notepad to Unicode mode.
Re:Wow. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Wow. (Score:4, Insightful)
When Ballmer claimed open-source is Communist, he was rightly criticized for making an absurd accusation with no evidence. Perhaps this should go both ways.
To compare with GNOME... (Score:3, Insightful)
That's WITHOUT the eyecandy.
Good job KDE! It's yet another reason to stop using GNOME, if all the Microsoft pandering wasn't enough.
Re:To compare with GNOME... (Score:5, Insightful)
If anyone created a KDE "theme" that made it look and work like Gnome, I'd be extremely happy with it. Probably the KDE camp would find that distasteful though.
Re:To compare with GNOME... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:To compare with GNOME... (Score:5, Insightful)
Omit this functionality if you wish but don't advertise it as a "feature."
Re:To compare with GNOME... (Score:4, Insightful)
In other words, Bill loves Gnome.
Maybe that's why there's so many KDE users when Gnome comes as default on damn near everything.
Re:To compare with GNOME... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:To compare with GNOME... (Score:5, Informative)
Don't have a background? Just the frame buffer to activate that graphics mode itself is 5.4 megs, regardless of what you put on it.
Just to keep things in perspective here. That Commodore 64 you had ran nicely in 64k of ram, but it also only had 320x200 graphics (160x200 in 4-color mode).
bash? pffft... (Score:5, Funny)
Also, you don't use init, you have the kernel run the aforementioned shell directly instead. Who needs all the cruft of startup services and a well set up tty, after all.
What Balderdash! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:What Balderdash! (Score:4, Insightful)
You sound like my dad, only he doesn't use a cane and he DID work on those punch card systems... he still reminisces about it and had that EXACT attitude when I showed him some of my OOP work in college, he asked me "where's the workflow, where's your goto's and breaks? what's all this mess?"
Granted he was from a generation that could use that "poor coding practice" of "goto's" and the like to go to the moon (presuming the naysayers are wrong
Re:bash? pffft... (Score:5, Insightful)
4...3....2......1....... (Score:5, Funny)
just to speed things up a bit:
CLI FTW!!! (Score:5, Funny)
It's a sad day in Linuxland. What became of the holier than thou, I program in assembly, certifiable *nix prick?
Oh, and don't forget, "Desktop environment x is so bloated."
Re:CLI FTW!!! (Score:5, Funny)
What do you mean? GUIs are awesome. With GUIs, you can open up dozens of command-line terminals side-by-side.
Nice (Score:4, Insightful)
less memory! (Score:4, Funny)
Re:less memory! (Score:5, Informative)
Just tried (Score:4, Interesting)
Still, covering 1/4 of the screen sure didn't take much memory!
Re:Just tried (Score:5, Insightful)
Speaking of wasted space and distractions, and not to be trollish, but I've always wondered why it is that KDE and Gnome insist on using large-to-oversized-to-supersized icons for everything, KDE being notable in that it traditionally distinguishes itself with icons of brighter colors, in wilder designs, and offers greater customisability?
Seems to me that the term eye-candy, while often used in a disparaging fashion, should refer to a certain kewl aesthetic, rather than literal candy of the M&M variety. It's almost the inverse of a Queer Eye for the Straight Guy episode -- instead of getting a great design from three flaming queers, you get a flaming queer design from a bunch of straight guys. Well, maybe not that bad, but still.
I mean, really, do people really need toolbars that takes up a 1/3 of the space of an application window? Is the boredom threshold so low that everything has to be decorated with bright colours, or is it that people find it hard to to hit things with their mouse? Sure, both KDE and Gnome are better than Windows, but by the time you've customised things to be less
Ohhhh (Score:1)
Well (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Well (Score:5, Informative)
Shows what is possible.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Shows what is possible.... (Score:5, Insightful)
New Headline: (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:New Headline: (Score:5, Interesting)
256mb? (Score:4, Funny)
IceWM is still the best (Score:2)
ressourcenhungriger (Score:5, Funny)
I think I just found my new word-of-the-week
misleading article (Score:2, Insightful)
Actually, the article states that it was run on an X60. I have an X61 (almost identical) and let me tell you, those are not the specs. It has a core 2 duo with an embedded graphics card capable of playing halflife 2 and portal (although not at excellent frame rate).
The article states that he used CPU scaling and some kernel arguments to reduce the system settings. This is actually very misleading and isn't equivalent to a system that ran at 1GHZ, as some commenters on his site point out.
The CPU may be running at a lower clock rate and have one core disabled, but clock rate isn't the only thing that determines CPU speed. The core 2 duo comes with SSE3, which any real 1GHZ machine will not have, and is majorly impactful for graphics operations. Also, the core 2 duo is designed for energy efficiency much more than prior intel and AMD CPU's. So, it likely has significantly more instructions per clock than a real 1GHZ machine. Finally, the graphics card is actually pretty decent (vista aero runs on it fine...) so there's nothing surprising about the computer being able to offload a lot of work to it.
So to summarize this computer has: SSE3, more clocks per cycle, and a nice graphics card that real machines of the 1GHZ era will not have. I'd be surprised if a machine with a lot higher MHZ but lacking SSE3 and the grpahics card could compete.
Also, all he ran on it was an instant messenger... which he said started slow. If he'd down any significant work with that amount of ram given KDE apps, it would have started swapping endlessly. This is not much of an endorsement for KDE.
Also, even if the claims of this article were true, which they aren't, it wouldn't be that impressive. I used to run OSX on a 333MHZ PPC with 32MB of ram, and it had all of the graphical glitzy crap that KDE and Gnome barely make work on high end machines. That a 1GHZ machine would seem impressive just shows how bloated and horribly slow modern desktops like vista, KDE, and Gnome have become.
As a side note, if Gnome or KDE work on your hardware (good luck) then go with it. I know that at least Gnome is pretty well supported, and that makes using linux a bit easier. If not, I highly recommend XFCE. It lacks some features, but has a much lighter weight design, is more compatable with various hardware, and has a window manager that isn't a total piece of shit like metacity and friends. It is especially handy for a laptop with an external monitor. Since xinerama actually works in XFCE (it has major bugs in metacity) you can run both your external monitor at full resolution and your laptop at a lower one, and stick all of the small windows you want to monitor on it (instant messenger, email, etc).
Re:setup (Score:5, Informative)
Sorry but you are completely full of shit. OS X does not run for any reasonable definition of "run" on 32mb of RAM.
Have a look at the minimum requirements for OS X 10.1 which you say was the most efficient OS X.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_OS_X_v10.1#System_Requirements [wikipedia.org]
Notably: RAM required 128 megabytes
And you're saying you did OpenGL development on a quarter of the minimum requirements. Riiight.
Troll. Nice one though. The moderators believed you at least.
Re:misleading article (Score:5, Interesting)
Also, since there's so much integration within KDE, the RAM usage doesn't jump that much when using an application. I'm running KDE 3.5 with opera, kmail, ktorrent, amarok, and yakuake, plus all the services, and I'm at about 300MB of RAM used - not much higher than when none of the apps are running.
Yeah but... (Score:3, Insightful)
looks like the prediction is comming true (Score:1)
SCNR... (Score:2)
Double buffering? (Score:3, Interesting)
Does anyone here know how much of the 40% save (however it is measured) comes as a result of applications no longer needing to do their own explicit buffering, in places where double buffering is desirable?
And whether there is a corresponding increase in memory used elsewhere, eg within the X server or in video memory itself?
Bad measurements (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm sorry, but just adding up the memory usage columns from something like 'top' is a horrible way to measure actual memory usage. Why? Well, shared libraries is one big reason. Most of those applications are likely to use a similar set of shared libraries, which the operating system only loads once in memory and then uses for all of the applications. However, things like 'top' include the memory usage of those libraries in every application that uses them. Thus, if 'libkdeprint' is 1 MB and is used by 10 KDE programs, the ACTUAL memory usage of that library would be 1 MB, but top would report 10 MB of memory used (1 MB for each app).
This effect is very noticeable with desktop environments like KDE and GNOME, where there are a ton of programs that all use the same set of shared libraries. If you reduced the size of a few very basic libraries (e.g. 'libkdecore') by a sizable amount, then you could show a fake "huge savings" across the ~30 KDE/GNOME apps that were running.
It isn't that I doubt that KDE 4 uses less memory -- it undoubtedly does -- it's just that using overly simplistic methods to measure the difference in usage is misleading and somewhat pointless.
See a longer discussion of the issue at: http://virtualthreads.blogspot.com/2006/02/understanding-memory-usage-on-linux.html [blogspot.com]
Seriously? (Score:1, Interesting)
Are people seriously bragging about composited graphics? I mean, Vista shipped with them a year ago.. VISTA. Are people supposed to be impressed with a feature set that has been available for years? Can we please get past this and move on to things that really matter?
Hmm (Score:1)
Re:Hmm (Score:4, Informative)
Ugly, ugly, ugly (Score:1)
Results are completely false (Score:5, Informative)
Has no one pointed out that the numbers are actually completely, utterly wrong? See Lubos and Thiagos (two high-ranking KDE and Qt devs) comments here:
http://www.kdedevelopers.org/node/3138
See the original authors retraction, here:
http://www.jarzebski.pl/read/kde-3-5-vs-4-0-round-two.so
So really, it should be "KDE4 uses 75% more memory", which is actually incredibly lame, but doesn't make for as good a title. I'm absolutely amazed that usually cynical slashdot readers have accepted this so uncritically.
Re:Results are completely false (Score:4, Informative)
Aaargh - it get's worse. In the new analysis, he doesn't even include X-server pixmap usage, which Qt4 abuses more than Qt3: in Qt4, all widgets are double-buffered by default, and since the majority of apps are basically windows that are almost 95% covered in widgets, this adds up, fast - a kwrite window, maximised on a 1600x1200, 24-bit screen will gobble up a whopping 6MB almost, just in double-buffering. When you take into account the fact that composite then redundantly double-buffers the entire window *again* (12MB per window, now!), it just gets even worse! So KDE4 is likely using more than twice as much RAM as KDE3, yet the headline reads "KDE4 uses 40% less memory than KDE3" and is tagged "amazing" - what a clusterfuck!
And since people have short-memories, when they do discover that KDE4 takes up hugely more memory than KDE3, they'll remember "KDE developers said it used less, not much more - liars!" rather than "Someone not affiliated with KDE published incorrect benchmarks and we didn't take time to verify them". As if the KDE guys need more abuse hurled at them :/
Powertop more important (Score:2)
Debunked by the KDE developers (Score:5, Interesting)
And it still looks ugly (Score:4, Insightful)
Are the GUI designers taking a nap while the programmers work? What's with all the empty space and huge nonessential widgets? Every single window in the screenshot (except maybe Konquerer) needs heavy redesigning:
- System monitor: Huge tabs, huge menu Compare it to Windows's Task manager or OSX Activity monitor - they pack much more data in a more readable way.
- Kopete: That toolbar is enormous! And the status bar at the bottom of the window looks mostly useless. The icons inside it are not only badly distributed spatially and of uneven / visually unadjusted size, they are also ugly and uninformative. The whole window looks like it's been designed by a novice VB programmer in a hurry.
- That window in the background: It looks like it's some sort of configuration application, and from what I see, the "main thing" in the application, probably the reasin the application exists, takes only about *half* of the window space. I'm talking about the list of effects. The rest of the window is taken by the menu, probably some kind of toolbar, probably a search bar, some kind of help label, tabs, a "hint", and a space at the bottom of the window which probably contains "ok/cancel/reset" buttons.
I'm not saying that all window elements should be close together - I appreciate the aesthetic space around the widgets, but this particular UI on this particular screenshot is heavily underdesigned.Let us not forget Mozilla. (Score:2)
So, is KDE 4 going to be a sleek carbon fibre shell on a titanium frame like Damn Small Linux, or is it going to be rice paper stretched over balsa wood like some of those Mozilla versions were?
Such a reduction.... (Score:1)
Most eye Candy doesn't use much memory. (Score:4, Informative)
Lets take the bouncing Icon. There are two normal ways to program this. Get the icon render each frame for each bounce and save it in memory. And just load the memory and play it. That way it plays smooth and quick every time, because it is in memory all pre-rendered. Now with a faster CPU which spend most of its time idle it can render the icon on the fly between each frame and still keep it smooth so all it needs to do is store the main image the next image to be displayed and perhaps what is currently on the screen. So with a 16x16x8 icon that is around 2k of ram using the CPU method it will only take 6k of ram. vs around 40k of ram for the bouncing icon. But if the CPU couldn't do the work in the time needed to get it done using the memory is the only good option. Memory vs. CPU has always been a balance.
Bogus numbers (Score:1)
No Print Selection and other Gotchas (Score:2)
Now the 4.x series uses trolltech's (QT?) printing backend there's STILL no print selection.
I've been flipping between the e17 that ships with the everex/walmart pc, which is buggy as hell and has a number of big-time gotchas and XFCE4 on Debian Etch. I enabled compositing on XFCE4 and it is an excellent balance of speed, eye candy and functionality. The default XFCE4 in Etch doesn't do it justice.
GNUStep (Score:2)
holy (Score:1)
Re:Sweet! (Score:2)
Re:Sweet! (Score:3, Informative)
However it is slower and bigger in the version demonstated, since a lot of debug code is in there.
MS is just looking more and more incompetent all the time.
Re:Sweet! (Score:3, Insightful)
A non-functioning "release-candidate" uses 40% less memory than it's predecessor. Impressive.
If it's a release candidate, it's functioning.
Re:Now if only... (Score:2, Interesting)
http://www.kde.org/announcements/announce_4.0-rc2/krunner.jpg [kde.org]
And this:
http://www.kde.org/announcements/announce_4.0-rc2/dolphin.jpg [kde.org]
Colours, fonts, and icons are all over the place. Insane and useless borders and gradients cluttering up the interface, and an overall lack of clarity of any kind. It's like a big joke.
I mean, just look at that krunner screenshot again. What is that thing? Black, white, black, white, then suddenly grey and shaded and colourful icons, and fonts right out of a VGA BIOS.
Re:Sweet! (Score:1)
Ah, the second time I've said this today: a release candidate is JUST THAT: A FUCKING CANDIDATE FOR RELEASE.
They are not non-functioning. They are feature complete. Release candidates become releases. Sure, they're not perfect but they're supposed to be basically "we think this is ready for production use, but we're just giving it one last test to be sure".
Re:Wow it runs well on a throttled Core2, (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Wow it runs well on a throttled Core2, (Score:2)
About 10 minutes after I started using it it grew on me. My issues with KDE4 are bugs, not the interface choices; as far as I can tell, Oxygen/Plasma/Phenon seems like excellent pieces of work, and everything they were cracked up to be.
If network browsing in Dolphin worked properly, (no more malformed URL errors), I'd be using it as my primary desktop.
The interface is very
Re:Wow it runs well on a throttled Core2, (Score:2)
If they'd shrunk a 1600x1200 screen with normal size icons/fonts down to the size they're using on the web page, you'd be complaining that the thing was too tiny to be usable.
And the battery "widget" looks more like an applet window to me, and probably resizable.
(Myself, I like the idea of window buttons on the side rather than along the top, makes better use of screen real estate especially on widescreens. Although I'd put it on the right, not the left. I put my main menu bar up against the right edge of my desktop rather than on the bottom, too.)
Re:Please post a new story. (Score:2)
Re:Please post a new story. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Now someday in the future... (Score:2)
As long as we're talking about oldschool (Score:2)
How are those security patches for your NT machine holding up?
Re:Now if only... (Score:2)
But yeah, the UI would take a lot more tweaking than KDE3 to look acceptable IMO.
Re:A bell ringed somewhere.... (Score:2)
A bell is rang, Saturn is ringed. Of course the bell could have rings in which case it could be ringed and rang at the same time.
English is easy. There's no excuse for these mistakes.