speeding up Plasma

[Animal]

I came across this video on YouTube the other day and decided to give what they demo a try

Dramatically speed up KDE Plasma

And from what I see it works, at least on my system now I don't want anyone to do anything that might break their system but if you have tried this or are willing to try, please let me know if you see any difference as well.

So if this does work why isn't it enabled by default? and how can I make it the default setting?

[Texstar]

add "Exec=plasma-desktop -graphicssystem raster" in /usr/share/autostart/plasma-desktop.desktop ?

[Animal]

should I also insert the code to kill the plasma desktop first?

[muungwana]

it makes things faster and it also makes plasma consume more memory so its a tradeoff ..it could overall slow things down on a system short in memory

[Animal]

i see, so what exactly does it do? does anyone know?

[muungwana]

i see, so what exactly does it do? does anyone know?

this link could help answer your question:
http://labs.trolltech.com/blogs/2008/10/22/so-long-and-thanks-for-the-blit/

[Animal]

Thanks for the link,

So I tried each command after a x restart and between these two

kquitapp plasma-desktop (to kill the desktop) can be done in the alt-f2 run dialog

plasma-desktop -graphicssystem raster (can also be done in the run dialog)

plasma-desktop -graphicssystem opengl (can also be done in the run dialog)

Out of these two the opengl seems to run faster and use less resources, at least for me.

The opengl option barely hits the cpu load under top when moving widgets around under 20% or so not so bad.

Let me revise the above statement: Under normal re-size and movement the usage spikes up to about 10% the 20% is when I aggressively move and re-size widgest.

[muungwana]

plasma was barely functional with opengl here .. it feels like the desktop is a bit faster with raster though ..

[Animal]

How much of a hit on performance are you taking on your cpu usage?

[muungwana]

plasma struggles to start up with opengl ..it seems to struggle doing the desktop drawing as its starting it and it has crashe a  couple of time after looking like it has hanged for a couple of seconds ..but when its up ..it runs just as fast as the raster engine ... i am compiling an app now so i cant get an accurate cpu consumption ..will test when i am done

[muungwana]

opengl doesnt seem to work on my system ..plasma attempts to use it and tries to fall back to something before crashing and then comes up up ..assuming back to default backend ...moving, rotating and resizing widgets is faster with raster engine ..

both engines dont seem to use cpu time at idle time and plasma goes to 20% when moving around widgets on the desktop ..

[redjama]

I can not believe the diff in speed.  I changed the setting to raster and this thing is faster then it has ever been.  I mean as soon as I click something its there, before it was fast but WOW, huge diff.  Good tip.  Everyone should be doing this

[MaddogF16]

Any ideas Tex if you think this is a bad idea or a try it and use it if you like it??  Anyone tried video,flash, and such to see if there's an improvement/unimprovement there??

[redjama]

I have run everything exactly the same no problems.  Just a huge diff in the desktop speed itself.

[Texstar]

Any ideas Tex if you think this is a bad idea or a try it and use it if you like it??  Anyone tried video,flash, and such to see if there's an improvement/unimprovement there??

Sounds great to me. I've been reading to see if individual KDE apps can get a performance boost as well. I feel the need for speed! lol I'll mod the KDE 4 on the next build after I finish the toolchain update which should fix some KDE 4 bugs currently in our packages due to the older compiler.