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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.
Someone call Bill Gates and tell him to read this.
Seek and ye shall find.
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.
Isn't that communist or something?
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Between this and Miguel de Icaza, it looks like I'll finally be switching to KDE.
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.
I just downloaded and ran the Debian live version using KDE4 in vBox. It was pretty. However, I couldn't figure out how to disable the "Lancelot" applet thing, which was annoying since anytime the mouse cursor got near it, it'd launch a 1/4-screen-covering window with lists of recent applications, documents, etc. Couldn't even right-click on it to disable.
Still, covering 1/4 of the screen sure didn't take much memory!
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.
Tsunami -- You can't bring a good wave down!
... with careful work. And a primary focus on excellence, instead of making money. And people that do care about their product.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
"KDE 3.5 Was A Major Memory Hog"
GEOS only uses 128kb and that is including eye candy, mind you 640*200 resolution.
WAY too much bloat for features most never use. Real men use dash (if you *must* have a program that's a shell and only a shell) or if you don't mind something a bit more versatile to save disk space at potentially the risk of slightly higher memory consumption when all you have is a shell, you use a symlink to busybox for your shell. But not with that glibc cruft mind you, uClibc is the only path to efficiency.
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.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
just to speed things up a bit:
"The fact that a new version of an application does not always ressourcenhungriger must prove the KDE project with the next generation of the environment."
I think I just found my new word-of-the-week
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
What!? Whatever happened to the "GUIs are for infants and grandmas. if you can't do it on the command line you shouldn't be allowed to use a computer in the first place" flame?
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."
You young whippersnappers and your fancy shell this and tty that. Real men feed their programs into a time share systems as big as a barn using punch cards, you young hooligan! Why, when I was a lad, all we had were toggles and lights, and we were grateful! Now get off my lawn before I shake my cane at you a second time!
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
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).
" What luck for rulers that men do not think" - Adolf Hitler
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
I wouldn't admit to having actually read it 10 times.
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.
Well, it works fine on an eeePC 900MHz celeron M (as has been noted earlier): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wedw701Gy8s
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.
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.
As with 99.9% of all memory benchmarking, it was done by someone who didn't totally understand how to measure memory use (and how Linux doesn't allow accurate measurements without a patched kernel). Just read the comments in the post which pointed at the original story.
http://www.illusionary.com/GNOMEvKDE.html
I was about to say 13256278887989457651018865901401704640, but it appears this number is private property.
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.
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.-- Sig down
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 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.
Victims of 9/11: <3000. Traffic in the US: >30,000/y
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.