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KDE 4 Uses 40% Less Memory Than 3 Despite Eye-Candy
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.
The laptop was recent, but he limited the memory use and throttled down the CPU to 1GHz. So it still had fancy instructions and a much bigger cache, bus, etc.
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The "unused" RAM won't be nice and empty. It'll be used as the system cache to store file data etc. that then can be accessed very quickly. Modern operating systems do not waste RAM by leaving it unused.
Keep in mind that even basic modern graphics wastes more memory than that. That background image you have on your 1600x1200 desktop? 5.4 megs. Need a few composite buffers? 5.4 megs each.
:-)
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).
I did in fact use the setup I described... and you can check that imacs were sold with 32 megs on wikipedia. Please check your facts before calling me a lier.
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
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.
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.
Well, KDE is listed on the Free Software Directory (directory.fsf.org). Also, just recently, RS was quoted commending KOffice devs, and challenging Gnome devs over their stances on ODF.
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. 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.
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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 :-(
I wrote my first program at the age of six, and I still can't work out how this website works.
It uses CPU Cycles, not Memory for most cases. With faster CPU's expected you can use less memory for more eye candy
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.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
pmap -d `pidof $application`
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