RE: Goals for 2.10 - desktop-wide profiling

[Alan Cox <alan lxorguk ukuu org uk>]

On Mer, 2004-09-22 at 03:10, Eugenia Loli-Queru wrote:
> open it is not usable). I know first hand, one of my machines had 128 MBs of 
> RAM and it was /just/ loadable, while Fedora really needs 192+ MBs, even if 
> at this time XP still requires 128 MB and Win98 64 MB (sure, Fedora is newer 
> than these OSes, but that doesn't mean that they don't still compete in the 
> corporate space).

Fedora 2 seems happy with 128Mb except with open office and to an extent
with Evolution. If you use abiword and balsa then its fine. Also
suprisingly effective is to recompile the entirity of Gnome with -Os to
size optimise it (easy with rpm or with jhbuild). For most uses this is
faster than -O2 because of the memory footprint improvement. A few files
prefer -O2 (image libraries for one).

> And some GTK+ speed profiling wouldn't hurt either. Gnome-applets are using 
> lots of memory too. All these issues are very common discussed on forums by 
> gnome users, I think it's time the gnome core devs to listen and be 
> realistic about it and start profiling.

We know some of the easy spots to hit - the theme memory and the X
server. Render extension stuf in Xorg 6.8.1 is a bit faster than it was
before thanks to Soreen but its definitely in need of more love.

> There was a time where the Linux desktop (with KDE/Gnome, in 1999) was 
> pitched as "lightweight" compared to Windows 2000 and Win98/ME. But this is 
> not the case anymore for the last 2+ years and the Linux corporate desktop 
> could be gaining advantages if KDE/Gnome were more optimized.

XFCe is still snappy in 32Mb using gtk2, so we know it can be done.