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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)