PAE

External Since: Sep 08, 2005 Posts: 188

On Friday 21 Aug 2009 18:19, David Bolt played with alphabet spaghetti and
left this on the plate:

> On Friday 21 Aug 2009 17:48, houghi played with alphabet spaghetti and
> left this on the plate:
>
>> David Bolt wrote:
>>> Surprisingly, KDE3.5 uses up a little more memory than KDE 4.1, but both
>>> use
>>
>> If by "Surprisingly" you mean you had expected a lot more, then I can
>> agree. A lot of work in KDE 4.x went into reducing memory usage and
>> increasing speed.
>
> I know. I was expecting KDE4 to use quite a bit less memory, and to start
> at least as quickly, if not to be quicker at loading.

Okay, looks like I need to slap knode around a bit. That was not supposed to
have been posted quite like that Sad

External Since: Sep 08, 2005 Posts: 188

On Friday 21 Aug 2009 18:09, houghi played with alphabet spaghetti and left
this on the plate:

> David Bolt wrote:
>> However, since you were interested in the timings, I created a brand new
>> user and have redone the memory used, and tried to see just how long it
>> takes for the desktop to fully appear, as this would give the times for
>> the first start-up. I timed how long it took, using my wrist watch, from
>> the moment I pressed return after entering the password, to the moment
>> the desktop stopped showing the "busy" mouse cursor.
>
> Would that be after booting? because if you login directly when it is
> possible, you will have a longer time as the system is still booting in
> the background.

No, it's after I'm able to log in at a console. The method was to start up,
log in to a console which can't be done until it's finished booting, get the
initial amount of memory used, switch back to the log-in screen, select the
user and desktop environment, then measure how long it took to log-in and
the "busy" mouse cursor went away. Then I opened up an xterm and measured
the amount of memory used again. Simple subtraction gives the amount of
memory used to load that desktop. After that, the system was completely
rebooted and the next next desktop checked.

> Also it is best to test with a 'fresh' machine each and every time, as it
> is possible that some GNOME things are loaded in KDE (or the other way
> around) increasing the speed of the first boot and as things are in
> memory, decreasing them for the second one.

That was the reason for the reboot. That prevented having things already in
memory from loading any of the previous desktops.

> Also some things are pre-loaded for KDE/GNOME which might be not the
> case or different when first running the other or having them installed
> both.

It might be an idea to see what is pre-loaded for each user as well as how
much memory is used. Looks like another test may be in order, although I'm
not sure about posting the results here. Having the output from "ps x" for
each desktop is going to be one pretty big article.

Regards,
David Bolt

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