KDE 4 Uses 40% Less Memory Than 3 Despite Eye-Candy 566
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.
Wow. (Score:5, Funny)
Unbloating? (Score:4, Funny)
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It possibly dates back to St. Augustine or even Cicero, but the most common wording of the idea in English is a straightforward translation from Pascal's.
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Re:Wow. (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Wow. (Score:4, Informative)
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Re:Wow. (Score:4, Funny)
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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.
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I was running Debian on a 300 MHz Pentium II back in 2003, when the rest of the world was using Windows XP. Performance wasn't an issue. Windows XP wouldn't have even installed on that hardware, much less run. (I did have Windows 2000 creaking along for a while, though, to run some Windows-only apps.)
P.S. Dynamic libraries actually reduce memory consumption because multiple apps can share the same memory.
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How does the number of dynamic libraries affect it? Linux running on a desktop is made up of thousands of smaller projects and libraries. Microsoft is able to consolidate these into fewer, larger, libraries. Does that have any advantage? In other words, could Linux benefit from combining lots of the smaller dynamic libraries into more monolithic libraries?
I just looked at random windows & linux sample systems. I found about 700 shared libraries on the linux system and about 2000 dll's on the windows system. I think you're starting from a flawed premise.
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.
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No, they're just people who care about writing equations more than they do about using regular expressions. You're the one on crack if you find that hard to understand. Different people have different needs; for example, my problem with OpenOffice Calc is that it wasn't capable of making bar graphs with "whiskers," which was required f
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If what you meant by that is that (for example) IE on windows loads faster than Firefox on Linux I think that is a big part of the problem with respect to Windows bloat.
Somewhere back in the 90s when people (unfortunately the wrong people) were making their decisions about what to run on their newly minted corporate PC networks the simple minded (or was it corrupt?) editors of some of the most popular tech publications would pit a product like
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When was the last time you used windows? What you have wrote just isn't true. The memory footprint for apps such as Word, Excel and Powerpoint are much lower than comparable Linux apps like OpenOffice, AbiWord and KWrite. Almost all Linux desktop programs takes longer to cold start than their windows (XP or 2000, I've no experience of Vista) equivalents thanks to the huge amount of dynamic libraries Linux uses.
First, you have just switched the issue from the OS to the applications.
That's almost-justified, as users generally care more about their apps than the OS.
Anyway, I won't challenge the fact that MS Office is made well, at least in the features vs. footprint and speed respect.
The UI is a whole new part of discussion, and quite irrelevant here.
Anyway, footprint and startup times are not necessarily equivalent.
EOG is slower than the image viewer in Windows, GEdit is much slower than notepad.exe, write.exe and so on. Internet Explorer and even Firefox starts faster on Windows than Linux.
Don't know about EOG, but Enlightenment's image viewer is about the fastest I've ever seen.
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.
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Why not dust off last year's OS, add a few bells and whistles, and then throw in the following:
void* waste_of_space = malloc(UPGRADE_CYCLE_DRIVING_WASTE_OF_RAM);
Re:Wow. (Score:4, Insightful)
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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.
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Since our colleagues insist on being pricks, I found this on the Security Now [grc.com] site:
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.
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The very best way to pander to Microsoft is to make your systems look and feel completely different from theirs, and to overload the interface with configuration options and a cluttered interface. That way, you manage to alienate any flip-floppers, and strengthen the hardcore geek market, which MS accepts they will never win back. MS wins because no-one leaves their platform, the competitor survives on a
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Summary of Ion features
* Tiled workspaces with tabbed frames, as discussed above.
* Designed to be primarily used from the keyboard.
* Fully documented configuration and scripting interface on top of the lightweight Lua extension language.
* Modular design. The main binary implements only basic window manager functionality. Additional modules implement extra features and window management policies.
* The query module implements a line editor
Re:To compare with GNOME... (Score:5, Insightful)
Omit this functionality if you wish but don't advertise it as a "feature."
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How often have *you* wondered why fonts on windows and OSX still look better - For the last 3 years none, I suggest you wake up from your slumber and look around.
When was the last time that you tried to use, say, firefox, via X11 across even a fast LAN network? - At the moment actually. When I am at home I use remote X instead of local even on my laptop which has a faster CPU (Dual Core2) than my aging server. Remote X and a well set-up Xterm is considerably faster than running X locally. The reason why
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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)
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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.
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
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Re:bash? pffft... (Score:5, Insightful)
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In this case the reduction in memory footprint really does seem to be down to better code / new and better tech
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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)
GNOME vs KDE (Score:3, Funny)
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).
Nice (Score:4, Insightful)
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less memory! (Score:4, Funny)
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I don't use KDE, but I use fluxbox so I can use my gigs of ram for actual applications. Until memory is literally free, all you "but memory is so cheap" people can kiss my ass.
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Re:less memory! (Score:5, Informative)
Just tried (Score:4, Interesting)
Still, covering 1/4 of the screen sure didn't take much memory!
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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
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I hate, with a passion, the default massive gumby sized icons and toolbars and everything that appear to be the norm in most Linux VMs. I don't run in 1600x1200 so I can waste half my desktop space with huge icons.
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Well (Score:5, Informative)
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Also notice that the guy is preparing a comparison with an older machine.
Re:Well (Score:5, Informative)
Shows what is possible.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Shows what is possible.... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Come to think of it, I use fvwm2, which is stable, fast, small and gives me as many virtual desktops as I like and they are next to each other. (I am not happy with less than 6 and currently use 9.)
I never understood the appeal of these MS-like window managers. Fortunately pretty much everything works with others too, including most KDE applications.
New Headline: (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:New Headline: (Score:5, Interesting)
256mb? (Score:4, Funny)
ressourcenhungriger (Score:5, Funny)
I think I just found my new word-of-the-week
Yeah but... (Score:3, Insightful)
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]
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pmap -d `pidof $application`
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 :/
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.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.
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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.
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Thus, I would sure hope their RC does not contain any debug code.
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A non-functioning "release-candidate" uses 40% less memory than it's predecessor. Impressive.
If it's a release candidate, it's functioning.
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You've already heard Microsoft's entire planned response (i.e. nothing).
If Microsoft were cornered on the question, their response would be "RAM is cheap and anything other than our software is crap anyway".
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Somehow the words "anything other than" made their way into the response.
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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I don't even want to think how Tiger would have run on it. The latest version I ran on it was Panther.
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.
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He said 10.0 not 10.1. Even so, I think folks are entitled to be a little hazy on machine specs from yesteryear. OS X 10.0 "ran" quite well on 64MB of RAM. (And 333 MHz is actually a pretty liberal estimate. I had 10.2 work quite nicely on an aging G3 Powerbook.)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_OS_X_v10.0 [wikipedia.org]
Re:Please post a new story. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Hmm (Score:4, Informative)
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Trolltech released QT v2.2 under the GPL back in September 2000 [linuxdevices.com], after which RMS stopped complaining and granted forgiveness [linuxdevices.com] as they did what they wanted.