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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.
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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  • Wow. (Score:5, Funny)

    by log1385 (1199377) on Thursday December 13, @08:41PM (#21692122)
    Someone call Bill Gates and tell him to read this.
    • Unbloating? (Score:4, Funny)

      by EmbeddedJanitor (597831) on Thursday December 13, @08:44PM (#21692156)
      Isn't that communist or something?
    • Re:Wow. (Score:4, Funny)

      by Titoxd (1116095) on Thursday December 13, @08:48PM (#21692208) Homepage

      Someone call Bill Gates and tell him to read this.
      It's 256 MB, not 640 K...
      • Re:Wow. (Score:4, Informative)

        by sqldr (838964) on Friday December 14, @06:59AM (#21695940)
        Funny as it is, the 640k thing is a myth. Asked about the subject, Mr Gates replied "I've said some pretty stupid things in my time, but not that". Sorry to ruin that for you :-(
        • Re:Wow. by nschubach (Score:3) Friday December 14, @07:34AM
        • Re:Wow. by Kjella (Score:2) Friday December 14, @09:41AM
          • Woz??? by sconeu (Score:2) Friday December 14, @11:56AM
            • Re:Woz??? by tuomoks (Score:2) Saturday December 15, @12:03PM
              • Re:Woz??? by sconeu (Score:2) Saturday December 15, @04:21PM
              • Re:Woz??? by tuomoks (Score:2) Saturday December 15, @06:43PM
        • Re:Wow. by noldrin (Score:2) Friday December 14, @10:31AM
        • Re:Wow. by srussell (Score:2) Friday December 14, @11:35AM
        • 1 reply beneath your current threshold.
      • Re:Wow. by OrangeTide (Score:2) Friday December 14, @12:05PM
      • 1 reply beneath your current threshold.
    • Re:Wow. by R15I23D05D14Y (Score:1) Thursday December 13, @08:53PM
      • Re:Wow. by Anonymous Coward (Score:3) Thursday December 13, @09:01PM
        • Backwards compatibility? by filbranden (Score:2) Friday December 14, @01:39AM
          • DOS programs by SEMW (Score:2) Friday December 14, @12:07PM
          • 1 reply beneath your current threshold.
        • Re:Wow. by jericho4.0 (Score:2) Thursday December 13, @10:17PM
          • Actually... (Score:5, Insightful)

            by DaedalusHKX (660194) on Thursday December 13, @11:05PM (#21693442) Journal
            And this is coming from a defender of the free market and devout believer in its virtues, but since Microsoft has largely benefited from partnering up with other large manufacturers of hardware and assemblers of said parts into systems to be sold, it would not be that hard to believe that they designed to a certain market level.

            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)

              I think this is probably true.

              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... by bjourne (Score:3) Friday December 14, @04:02AM
                • Re:Actually... by pembo13 (Score:3) Friday December 14, @05:27AM
                • Re:Actually... by FrostedChaos (Score:3) Friday December 14, @05:35AM
                • Re:Actually... (Score:4, Insightful)

                  by marcello_dl (667940) on Friday December 14, @05:43AM (#21695622) Homepage Journal
                  In my experience a linux desktop is noticeably faster than an XP one, especially if you are doing things in the background (mastering, file transfers, network). The GUI is faster, same programs take less time to start up (gimp). MS stuff feels faster than Linux equivalents on the same OS, yes. But when i get into excel and find no regular expressions as find options, I wonder if people dissing openoffice because it lacked some equation editor options were on crack.

                  XP boots faster, but it's not ready when it displays the desktop, so i always get the hourglass. Notfunny.
                • Re:Actually... by cp.tar (Score:3) Friday December 14, @06:30AM
                • KWrite? (Score:5, Interesting)

                  by orzetto (545509) on Friday December 14, @06:56AM (#21695928)

                  The memory footprint for apps such as Word, Excel and Powerpoint are much lower than comparable Linux apps like OpenOffice, AbiWord and KWrite.

                  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.

                  GEdit is much slower than notepad.exe,

                  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? by msormune (Score:1) Friday December 14, @08:00AM
                  • Re:KWrite? (Score:5, Interesting)

                    by mrchaotica (681592) * <.mrchaotica. .at. .yahoo.com.> on Friday December 14, @08:17AM (#21696318)

                    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...

                    ...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:KWrite? by Inda (Score:2) Friday December 14, @08:25AM
                    • Re:KWrite? by yanos (Score:2) Friday December 14, @10:47AM
                      • Re:KWrite? by rajafarian (Score:2) Friday December 14, @12:01PM
                      • Re:KWrite? by Wannabe Code Monkey (Score:2) Friday December 14, @12:29PM
                      • Re:KWrite? by ZERO1ZERO (Score:1) Friday December 14, @01:13PM
                    • Re:KWrite? by ed.markovich (Score:1) Friday December 14, @01:36PM
                      • Re:KWrite? by zooblethorpe (Score:2) Friday December 14, @04:52PM
                      • Re:KWrite? by mrchaotica (Score:2) Friday December 14, @07:40PM
                      • Re:KWrite? by ed.markovich (Score:1) Friday December 14, @05:35PM
                      • Re:KWrite? by zooblethorpe (Score:2) Friday December 14, @07:11PM
                      • Re:KWrite? by ed.markovich (Score:1) Friday December 14, @08:19PM
                      • Re:KWrite? by ed.markovich (Score:1) Friday December 14, @08:24PM
                      • Re:KWrite? by zooblethorpe (Score:2) Saturday December 15, @12:44AM
                      • Re:KWrite? by ed.markovich (Score:1) Saturday December 15, @01:38AM
                      • Re:KWrite? by zooblethorpe (Score:2) Saturday December 15, @07:15PM
                    • Re:KWrite? by MeBot (Score:1) Friday December 14, @03:32PM
                    • 1 reply beneath your current threshold.
                  • Re:KWrite? by KingOfBLASH (Score:2) Friday December 14, @08:24AM
                  • Re:KWrite? by CastrTroy (Score:2) Friday December 14, @09:33AM
                  • Re:KWrite? by mahlerfan999 (Score:1) Friday December 14, @11:17AM
                    • Re:KWrite? by HappySmileMan (Score:1) Friday December 14, @12:13PM
                      • Re:KWrite? by Fallingcow (Score:2) Friday December 14, @01:58PM
                    • Re:KWrite? by cp.tar (Score:2) Friday December 14, @03:28PM
                • Re:Actually... by budgenator (Score:2) Friday December 14, @07:07AM
                • Re:Actually... by ookaze (Score:2) Friday December 14, @07:36AM
                • Re:Actually... by someone1234 (Score:2) Friday December 14, @07:47AM
                • Re:Actually... by domatic (Score:1) Friday December 14, @08:13AM
                • Re:Actually... by Anzhr (Score:1) Friday December 14, @08:47AM
                • Re:Actually... by wile_e_wonka (Score:2) Friday December 14, @09:27AM
                • Re:Actually... by yuna49 (Score:2) Friday December 14, @10:52AM
                • Re:Actually... by corychristison (Score:2) Friday December 14, @11:32AM
                • Re:Actually... by immcintosh (Score:2) Friday December 14, @12:59PM
                • Re:Actually... by xhrit (Score:1) Friday December 14, @01:52PM
                • 6 replies beneath your current threshold.
              • Re:Actually... by ibbie (Score:1) Friday December 14, @07:24AM
              • Re:Actually... by backwardMechanic (Score:2) Friday December 14, @07:51AM
              • Re:Actually... by hey! (Score:2) Friday December 14, @09:25AM
              • Re:Actually... by pseudorand (Score:2) Friday December 14, @10:15AM
              • Re:Actually... by Lisandro (Score:2) Friday December 14, @10:21AM
              • Re:Actually... by Just Some Guy (Score:2) Friday December 14, @11:35AM
              • Which is why I run win2k... by ResidentSourcerer (Score:1) Monday December 17, @12:39AM
              • 1 reply beneath your current threshold.
            • The beauty of OSS code.. by msimm (Score:2) Friday December 14, @02:21AM
            • Re:Actually... by pragma_x (Score:3) Friday December 14, @10:36AM
          • Re:Wow. by marcello_dl (Score:2) Friday December 14, @09:29AM
        • Re:Wow. by AvitarX (Score:1) Friday December 14, @12:07AM
          • Re:Wow. by donaldm (Score:3) Friday December 14, @03:43AM
            • Re:Wow. by Skreems (Score:2) Friday December 14, @04:34AM
            • Re:Wow. by David Gerard (Score:2) Friday December 14, @08:23AM
              • Re:Wow. by gnuman99 (Score:2) Friday December 14, @12:51PM
            • Re:Wow. by AvitarX (Score:1) Friday December 14, @01:25PM
        • Re:Wow. by abigor (Score:2) Friday December 14, @12:38AM
        • 1 reply beneath your current threshold.
      • Re:Wow. by wwahammy (Score:2) Thursday December 13, @10:01PM
        • Re:Wow. by HiThere (Score:2) Thursday December 13, @11:08PM
          • Re:Wow. (Score:4, Insightful)

            by wwahammy (765566) on Friday December 14, @02:01AM (#21694586)
            What DRM processing? You act like every single system call is brute force decoding a message from the NSA or something. You're making this absurd accusation without backing it up.

            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.
            • Re:Wow. by cheater512 (Score:2) Friday December 14, @02:56AM
              • Re:Wow. by wwahammy (Score:1) Friday December 14, @03:24AM
              • Re:Wow. by the_B0fh (Score:1) Friday December 14, @07:29AM
              • Re:Wow. by coolGuyZak (Score:3) Saturday December 15, @02:51PM
              • Re:Wow. by wwahammy (Score:2) Saturday December 15, @06:01PM
            • Re:Wow. by PhxBlue (Score:2) Friday December 14, @12:45PM
            • 1 reply beneath your current threshold.
      • Re:Here we go again by Zoolander (Score:2) Friday December 14, @04:28AM
      • 1 reply beneath your current threshold.
    • Re:Wow. by atani (Score:1) Friday December 14, @10:52AM
    • 1 reply beneath your current threshold.
  • To compare with GNOME... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 13, @08:43PM (#21692142)
    GNOME running WITHOUT Compiz requires a good 256MB.

    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.
  • Nice (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Cairnarvon (901868) on Thursday December 13, @08:45PM (#21692166) Homepage
    Between this and Miguel de Icaza, it looks like I'll finally be switching to KDE.
    • Re:Nice by kusanagi374 (Score:3) Thursday December 13, @08:52PM
      • Re:Nice by Daniel Phillips (Score:3) Friday December 14, @04:33AM
    • Re:Nice by squiggleslash (Score:2) Thursday December 13, @08:57PM
      • Re:Nice by darkonz (Score:1) Thursday December 13, @09:32PM
        • Re:Nice by Fred_A (Score:2) Friday December 14, @09:41AM
        • Re:Nice by MojoStan (Score:2) Friday December 14, @12:26PM
    • Re:Nice by noldrin (Score:2) Friday December 14, @11:41AM
  • less memory! (Score:4, Funny)

    by arse maker (1058608) on Thursday December 13, @08:45PM (#21692172)
    Now I can just leave my extra few gigs of ram nice an empty, they need a rest! Once we get it down to 640k we can move back to dos.
  • Just tried (Score:4, Interesting)

    by gardyloo (512791) on Thursday December 13, @08:47PM (#21692192)