Acer Travelmate laptop, 1.3GHz Pentium M, 12MB Ram. Opensuse 11.4 (upgraded from 11.3)
Vanilla install, not running anything special, always startup and shutdown from scratch, never sleep
For several minutes after KDE appears and I open an app (any app, e.g. Chrome) the hard disk is going nuts. WTF is it doing and how do I stop it? Also some programs take years to start, e.g. digicam took TEN minutes the other day even after waiting a while after booting, the disk thrashing the whole time. But in 11.3 it started almost instantly. Again, WTF?
I’m sure you don’t mean 12MB of ram, do you? Even Windows 95 would struggle with that. If that’s all there is, No wonder it’s thrashing (swapping like crazy). You really need >512MB and the more the better (double that or more with KDE4).
If instead you meant 512MB, you should consider running a much lighter DE such as LXDE (installable by Pattern - see YaST), or one of the others offered by openSUSE (usually all included on the DVD).
>
> If instead you meant 512MB, you should consider running a much lighter
> DE such as LXDE (installable by Pattern - see YaST), or one of the
> others offered by openSUSE (usually all included on the DVD).
>
It can be that nepomuk/strigi do heavy indexing in the background (which
would also explain why the hard disk is contiously accessed). I would check
if by pressing [CTRL] [ESC] some processes with nepomuk or strigi in its
name are running.
If yes I would disable the services in the control center.
–
PC: oS 11.3 64 bit | Intel Core2 Quad Q8300@2.50GHz | KDE 4.6.2 | GeForce
9600 GT | 4GB Ram
Eee PC 1201n: oS 11.4 64 bit | Intel Atom 330@1.60GHz | KDE 4.6.0 | nVidia
ION | 3GB Ram
That may be so, but even with those services disabled on a 1.8GHz cpu with 512MB ram and KDE4, I needed to upgrade the ram by adding 1GB to improve the response while increasing the number of concurrent applications.
Will check for services, thanks but amazed that the difference between 11.3 and 11.4 means I need to double my RAM, esp re: DigiKam! Looks like I’ll have to drop back. Can I get/run DigiKam, Chrome, Google Earth and XBMC under LXDE or whatever?
I do not disagree that 512M is a bit too less for KDE 4. But you do not need
an awfull lot more.
This week I installed 11.4 32 bit on an old Amilo 1703 La for my step son.
We tested KDE4 and it works really well with only 896 MB RAM (which is the
available 1GB RAM minus the 128 MB which are used by the shared memory for
the graphics card) and this was also the feedback he gave me today that it
is now faster. He had Linux Mint 10 with Gnome on it before and believe it
or not, my feeling was that KDE is more responsive on that machine.
I also disabled the nepomuk service there.
But back to the topic, I think it is worth a try to to put KDE a bit on diet
and see if it works on the 512 MB. (I found that this seems to be the real
amount of RAM by the hints google gives for Acer Travelmate laptop, 1.3GHz
Pentium M). If it does not work well the OP can still use a more lightweight
DE.
–
PC: oS 11.3 64 bit | Intel Core2 Quad Q8300@2.50GHz | KDE 4.6.2 | GeForce
9600 GT | 4GB Ram
Eee PC 1201n: oS 11.4 64 bit | Intel Atom 330@1.60GHz | KDE 4.6.0 | nVidia
ION | 3GB Ram
Well LXDE is more Gnome like, but you can run KDE apps under Gnome, so I don’t see why not on LXDE. I’m not saying the upgrade is needed for 11.4, as I made it mainly for application reasons and 11.2 (Gnome was quicker than KDE) to 11.3. It also depends how you use it for applications and whether that includes concurrent multimedia, or even virtualization (e.g. vitrtualbox). It can also depend on what graphics chip/card you use. I just think 512MB is a bit low for KDE unless you run your larger apps one at a time. Digikam can be heavy on memory and has a bit of a track record for mem leaks, but that is one I use.
Others may like to recommend a more KDE like but lighter DE…
I would go along with that. I only added 1GB to max-out the second memory slot as it was the most cost-effective upgrade. I wouldn’t have wanted a further upgrade on that machine, as I was adding a newer and more powerful one.
I run my machine with 4gb but still found it best to disable the file indexing utility in KDE4. I noticed that from a clean install that the most noticeable delays were in kmail as my emails built up. I expected to find that strigi was enabled but only nepomuk was enabled. Disabling that removed these particular delays. Other delays were down to acpi-cpufeq.
As some sort of index can speed up file searching dramatically I installed locate which ungreyed kfind’s use index setting. Not sure if this has worked. A search for log;*.log gave 4,000 results and took over a min. A more realist *.log from /// takes about 50secs and found 15 files. It seems to be noticeably quicker if the use index box is left unchecked. This also produced more results for the same search. 17 in the case of the *.log search.
