mupuf.org // we are octopimupuf.org

Idle: Make Your KDE Snappier

If there is some­thing I re­ally ex­pect out of to­day’s com­puter, it is per­for­mance.

I’ve been a KDE4 user since the ver­sion 4.3 and there are a lot of per­for­mance im­prove­ments to be made. As I usu­ally like bleed­ing edge/un­sta­ble (call it the way you pre­fer) soft­ware,

As it is su­per easy on Arch­Linux, I have been test­ing kde 4.6 since the beta 1’s re­lease. Apart from some graph­i­cal glitches, I was very pleased with it, es­pe­cially from a per­for­mance point of view.

And then came the Re­lease Can­di­date 1. The sys­tem be­came un­re­spon­sive as the per­for­mance dropped to an in­sanely poor level!

MaxFPS set to 35 in­stead of 60

First of all, the FPS rate dropped from 100 fps to 35. It ap­pears that some smart devs thought that would free up to re­sources (and made an­i­ma­tions look like bull­crap!). While I agree 100 fps was too much, I would have con­sid­ered hav­ing a max­i­mum fps rate set to the screen’s re­fresh rate (ie. 60fps on most com­put­ers now).
You can fix this by edit­ing the kwin con­fig­u­ra­tion file:

$EDITOR ~/.kde4/share/config/kwinrc
...
[Compositing]
MaxFPS=60
...

Use the Qt’s built-in raster en­gine

I will quote Zack Rusin (from VMWare). Please read his blog­post called More 2D in KDE (you may want to read all his blog as some ar­ti­cles he writes are truly amaz­ing!).

If you’re con­vinced you should use (or try) the raster en­gine, the sim­plest way is to add this line to /etc/pro­file:

export QT_GRAPHICSSYSTEM=raster

This should give a nice per­for­mance boost :)

LIBGL_AL­WAYS_IN­DI­RECT?

Some peo­ple also need to use in­di­rect ren­der­ing to get more per­for­mance :o! As I am too lazy to ex­plain what it is, here is a nice link What does LIBGL_AL­WAYS_IN­DI­RECT=1 ac­tu­ally do?.

If you want to give it a try, add this line to /etc/pro­file:

export LIBGL_ALWAYS_INDIRECT=1

Con­clu­sion

Fol­low­ing those steps (but not LIBGL_AL­WAYS_IN­DI­RECT) lead me to a tremen­dous per­for­mance/ex­pe­ri­ence im­prove­ment.

My KDE is now snap­pier than ever. Point #1 is a shame IMO, why the hell one would want 35fps on his desk­top!? This is in­sane!

Comments