KDE Performance Boost Ahead

Have you experienced performance issues when using KDE? If so, then you aren't the only one. While things have been improving as KDE 4 matures, some users still have registered complaints. And one KDE hacker is trying to address them.

Martin Gräßlin had begun working towards "rendering at 60 frames" per second. Gräßlin stated in a blog post today, "I could not imagine how a frame could take longer to render than the 16.67 msec." But after some thought he realized where a couple of bottlenecks may be hiding.

In testing the effect chain performance, Gräßlin discovered a bug that was slowing down the works. This will be fixed in 4.7.2. He states this will improve performance quite a bit.

But a significant improvement will come in 4.8. One of the ideas he's been mulling over for a while involves the way the repaint loop draws the windows. In normal operation the effect chain calls on each effect process to repaint the interface according to what the user or the desktop is doing. Many times, this is little or nothing but each effect is repainted. This is where Gräßlin thought some time could be saved. He figures if the effect chain only called on the active effects and redrew the frames accordingly then performance could be enhanced.  As an added bonus, with this improvement other slow checks were identified and put to the same check.

So, if you've been wishing for better KDE performance, you may soon get it. Gräßlin also hopes to then optimize the paint method by moving some of the heavier operations out of the loop.

I know I for one am so looking forward to testing that.  My performance issues arise only when doing certain tasks, but this sounds like it could really help. Yippie!