Messages in this thread | | | From | Oliver Neukum <> | Subject | Re: The reason to call it 3.0 is the desktop (was Re: [OT] 2.6 not 3.0 - (NUMA)) | Date | Mon, 7 Oct 2002 11:18:44 +0200 |
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On Monday 07 October 2002 10:08, Helge Hafting wrote: > "Martin J. Bligh" wrote: > > > Then there's the issue of application startup. There's not enough > > > read ahead. This is especially sad, as the order of page faults is > > > at least partially predictable. > > > > Is the problem really, fundamentally a lack of readahead in the > > kernel? Or is it that your application is huge bloated pig? > > Often the latter. People getting interested in linux > seems to believe that openoffice is the msoffice replacement, > and that _is_ a huge bloated pig. It needs 50M to start > the text editor - and lots of _cpu_. It takes a long time > to start on a 266MHz machine even when the disk io > is avoided by the pagecahce.
OpenOffice _is_ an important application, whether we like it or not.
How does one measure and profile application startup other than with a stopwatch ? I'd like to gather some objective data on this.
> A snappy desktop is trivial with 2.5, even with a slow machine. > Just stay away from gnome and kde, use a ugly fast
A desktop machine needs to run a desktop enviroment. Only a window manager is not enough.
> window manager like icewm or twm (and possibly lots > of others I haven't even heard about.) > X itself is snappy enough, particularly with increased > priority. > Take some care when selecting apps (yes - there is choice!) > and the desktop is just fine. Openoffice is a nice > package of programs, but there are replacements for most > of them if speed is an issue. If the machine is powerful > enough to run ms software snappy then speed probably > isn't such a big issue though.
KDE and friends _are_ not quite optimised for speed. That however doesn't mean that the kernel should not make an effort to allow them to run as fast as they can.
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