On Fri, Jul 05, 2002 at 11:45:53PM +0200, Ingolf Steinbach wrote:
> On Friday, 5. July 2002 23:38, Jared D. McNeill wrote:
> > My SPARCstation 10 has 128 megs of RAM, and KDE 2.2.2 was unusably slow as
> > well. I assumed that the lack of speed was processor-related.
> 
> I'd thought that, too, if top did not display CPU idle amount
> of some 20%...

The problem is that C++ programs have to do a lot of relinking when a program
starts.  The bigger and more complex the class libraries, the worse it is.

KDE and Qt are huge C++ monsters.

There is a paper written about this which goes into some details about
why C++ applications are slow, and another that is specifically about
KDE and QT application startup times.  I've lost them both, but Google
should find the information.  In the KDE/QT paper the guy says that one
KDE application does 47K relink operations each time it starts.

Part of it is GNU C++ problems, and part of it is just a fact of life
with C++ programs.

The new C++ tools I got in my Slackware 8.1 Linux system do object
prelinking automatically, or so I'm told, which helps anywhere from
a little to a lot.  This used to be a separate and optional step when
building KDE.



-- 
UNIX/Perl/C/Pizza__________________________________shannon@widomaker.com