Has KDE 4 caught up with KDE 3 yet?

Posted Apr 23, 2010 16:52 UTC (Fri) by jospoortvliet (guest, #33164)
In reply to: Has KDE 4 caught up with KDE 3 yet? by jschrod
Parent article: Aaron Seigo on the Future of KDE (Datamation)

on the other hand, having 20+ processes (a number of plasmoids which is conservative on many setups) will eat memory like crazy. I'd rather have them in one multi-threaded process. Plasmoids should become more and more scripted (ECMA, python, ruby, etc) in the future and only the core plasmoids will be C++. And should obviously be as much stabilized and tested as possible...

Has KDE 4 caught up with KDE 3 yet?

Posted Apr 23, 2010 17:37 UTC (Fri) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link] (3 responses)

if they are well written to begin with they should not eat significantly more memory when run as separate processes then when running on one giant process.

Has KDE 4 caught up with KDE 3 yet?

Posted Apr 24, 2010 8:44 UTC (Sat) by jospoortvliet (guest, #33164) [Link] (2 responses)

As I'm not a developer, I can't really argue this. The only thing I know is that the plasma devs told me that running each plasma widget (panels, background and every widget on them) in a separate process would eat memory like crazy and introduce a lot of overhead in synchronizing things. The latter has to do with the synchronizing of animations they do and saving power as well - events are gobbled up and fired at certain intervals to wake up the proc as little as possible, saving power on battery. This is hard if not impossible when running in separate processes, where all the separate plasmoids would wake up the proc at different points in time preventing it from sleeping or clocking down.

I greatly respect the core plasma hackers and I'm sure the situation might be more complex than you think...

Has KDE 4 caught up with KDE 3 yet?

Posted May 3, 2010 19:21 UTC (Mon) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link] (1 responses)

with the linux COW feature, they won't use much more memory.

synchronization would be an issue, but how close does the animation of different things need to be synced? and why? In anycase, this is what Futex are good for.

wakeups can be batched by the OS (there have been some articles on this recently)

I suspect that the core plasma hackers are focused so tightly on their use-case and world that they are missing the other advantages.

putting everything in one process is great for some things, but it makes things very fragile as there are a LOT of ways for things to go wrong.

Has KDE 4 caught up with KDE 3 yet?

Posted May 3, 2010 20:22 UTC (Mon) by jospoortvliet (guest, #33164) [Link]

Hmmm... I'm unsure if the reasons behind the one-process thing have been documented somewhere, couldn't find something quickly. If you want you could ask on #plasma (freenode) and see if anyone knows - maybe there are indeed possibilities and if you can argue a good case I'm sure the plasma devs would listen... I suspect it wouldn't even be that hard to write a proof-of-concept, and for that I'm SURE the devs would support you...

Again, I can't really argue about this, but I certainly would appreciate a more stable Plasma so if you could find it in your hart to put in the effort to make it possible, my blessing is yours ;-)