Optimize linux and KDE 3.5 for Speed
 

Hi,
I use my pc mainly for productivity, e-mail, web, open office and that sort of stuff.
Iwant to make linux as fast as possible. I don't mean time to boot up or games but rather response time. For example when I click the "Home" button, I want the konqueror button to pop up immediately (currently it takes about 3 seconds). On windows I always disable Effects and use classic Start Menu.
I have KDE 3.5 and Debian Sarge unstable. I chose the fastest settings in the "Desktop Settings Wizard".
What else can I do? More swap? In control center it says something about RAM settings that has to do with performance. How does that work?
I use and Intel Celeron 2.6 Ghz Processor with 256 MB of Ram. How much swap do you recommend? Is there any limit going up?

Currently, the system does not run faster than Windows XP. I would like to get it beyond that.

Also, does speed depend on your distro or is it mostly the configuration?

thanks,
-sunpascal

go into control centre and turn off unneccesary effects/shadows etc.

I have KDE 3.5 with reansparency on menus, things like Konqueror start almost imeediately (measured in ms), but that was after tweaking it through control panel (its never gonna be as fast as fluxbox or the like unfortunately :()

sorry, I'm not sure where to turn that off. Can you describe it?

Get Gentoo :)

Ultimate linux tweakers distro.

I wouldn't recomend you to leave Debian (it's true you can go Gentoo, but this means a lot of compiling time...).

I would advice you leave KDE, so. You could try something ligther, like Gnome (it runs fast in a Celeron 1Ghz, 256Mb RAM I got). If you really want something fast and do not care much about eye-candy, you can try fluxbox.

Whatever you do, it depends a lot on which applications you use the most. You mentioned firefox. I think firefox is Gtk based, but KDE is based on Qt. So when you run it on KDE, you have GTk AND Qt AND Gtk loaded, using more RAM. Gnome, on the other hand, uses Gtk, so for firefox you save some memory. But then, KDE's got a lot of applications that you may be using (kate, kalarm, etc), so moving to Gnome won't improve too much, because anyway you'll have the two libraries running.

In any case, having more SWAP won't make things faster. If your computer is using the SWAP then getting more RAM (freeing it, or buying it) is the way to go.

HTH

I used to have gnome - and I really liked it. But then it is lacking essential functions. And I do use mostly (but not only) KDE apps.

I thought people would tell me to switch my DE, but I won't let go of KDE....

Sad, that my linux box is just as slow as windows.

What are the hardware specs? Which services/daemons are you running?
Personally I don't think it makes much sense to give up KDE if you're
using KDE apps - kdeinit and the whole blob of fat-bottomed libs will
be in RAM for those anyway ;}


Cheers,
Tink

make sure just in general you are not using system services you don't need
that stup at boot -- trim it down as far as you can go.
turn of famd for one thing if it's running KDE does not need it
for a ltle extra RAM go to the file /etc/inittab and comment out with a #
2 through 6 of those
2:2345:respawn:/sbin/agetty lines
in kcontroll go to KDE components -> service manager and turn of everything under Startup Services also
under appeaaence and theemes -> Launch feedback set to No Busy Cursor will help
under style effects uncheck enable GUI effects
if you want to go all out disable everything under style -- tooltips -- icons -- mouseovers everything you can live without.
disable KDE sound system and have your apps just use alsa
undo all the system notification events
uncheck use system bell if it's checked

last thing is build you a new kernel that only support your hardware and nothing else and before you compile your new kernel hack the kernel makefile -- make it do verbose output so you can see whats going on and put in the most agressive gcc optimizations you can find for your processor.

yea i use fluxbox cause i can't stand KDE but i use KDE apps so i load up kdeinit when i startx and still some of that DCOP junk don't work right.
but all the fat bottomed libs don't get loaded -- one of the cool things about Linux as only needed code gets loaded not whole libs i think ? so at least some of the desktop junk stays in the lard pool.