Hi!

Im running mandrake with KDE, and Im looking for good performance/tweak tips on how to make KDE faster, and give faster respons. With the setting im using now, it takes 10seconds to open konqueror. IMO, this is not acceptable. X itself takes 15megs of RAM, and i have an average systemload on over 2.0.

I have disabled all fancy stuff like transparent menus, mouse-over effects and animated windows etc. etc. etc. A normal session for me is:

Starting KDE, with a light background-image. The kicker, some desktop icons. Then i use Opera, Konqueror, Xmms, X-chat, Aterm, Kontakt. I also run an httpd-server that few people are visiting. And an ssh-server always running.

From "ps -e" Im also wondering what these processes are:
5 ? 00:00:00 kapmd
8 ? 00:00:04 kswapd0
9 ? 00:00:00 aio/0
11 ? 00:00:00 kseriod
15 ? 00:00:09 kjournald
105 ? 00:00:00 devfsd
236 ? 00:00:00 khubd
696 ? 00:00:01 kjournald
1368 ? 00:00:00 portmap
1791 ? 00:00:06 klogd
2035 ? 00:00:00 atd
2061 ? 00:00:00 smartd
2961 tty1 00:00:46 magicdev
2975 tty1 00:00:00 gconfd-2
2978 ? 00:00:05 kdeinit
2987 ? 00:32:11 fam
2998 tty1 00:00:00 kwrapper
2999 ? 00:00:00 pdflush
Is there something i dont need here? (BTW, there are more instances of kdeinit. How many kdeinit's do I need?)

Any performance/tweak tips will be greatly appreciated

How fast is the CPU and how much ram? Disabling more feature might give some added speed but I have never found KDE to be that fast. You might want to consider using a window-manager instead of a desktop environment and replace konqueror with something light-weight such as firefox. I know the mandrake cd's come with blackbox, icewm, enlightenment and probably xfce. You might want to give those a try.

basially it's more a problem of a bloated distro -- but there is stuff to do
turn off all unused services being started at boot
you can turn off -- fam -- most likely being started by xinetd
fam and kde don't seem to get along too well
recompile kernel with optimizations (-O3) for your processor (-mcpu=)
(you have to hack the kernel Makefile)
and slimm the kernel down to only support your exact hardware and nothing else
and without filesystem debugging and whatnot can really inprove kernel i/o throuput
(use -s compiler flag and never use -g so you have no debug symbols)
you can also compile qt and kde by hand with optimizations and they will run alot better
also better to have qt/kde use external libs instaed of internal whenever possible in ./configure
don't wory about the kdeinits
basically kde and qt are single huge libraries (not millions of small libs like gnome)
so they are slow to load but once loaded at startup everything should run good
unless things are being swapped out
for size it may help to just strip the libs of debugging symbols
caution this might kill your libraries though i have never experienced that so make a backup
call
strip --strip-debug
on libqt-mt and libkde
also the gentoo linux people have been able to really improve kde load times using prelink
i can't get prelink to work on kde but i bet you can read the gentoo delopers baords and find out how they did it (or possibly your disro is doing it already but i doubt it ??)