Isn't GNOME pretty slow?

[Dolda2000]

OK, I'm not using GNOME applications very often, even though I use it as my DE. However, when I do, I noticed that they take really long to start.
When I start, say, gnome-calculator from a cold cache, it can take up to 1.5 seconds or more, and even when I start it from a cold cache it takes surely 0.4 seconds or so. I made some timing runs, and it seems that almost all GNOME programs take at least 0.2 seconds of user-mode CPU time only to start up. Isn't that pretty bad?
Should I even mention nautilus? The few times I care to look at nautilus, it takes surely a two or three seconds only to retrieve the 85 files that I have in my home dir...
Am I the only one to experience this? I haven't done any timing runs in Gentoo, only in RH8. Does anyone know if it's a known problem?
In my experience, KDE is just as bad, but I can't really say that I have much experience with KDE, so also, is it like this in KDE as well?

[Dillinger]

It took 4 seconds to open a directory with 13 items in it on a cold cache, about 1 second after it. I'm running Gentoo on a 550 mHz pentium 3 with 256mb ram, and I'm still noticing a few things are a little laggy. I'm upgrading my system soon, so hopefully that will all go away. KDE was worse when I used it in Mandrake, good riddence. Regardless, this system is blazing fast compared to when I was running XP on this thing, oh man.

[andutt]

Im almost always uses KDE, which i havent notice is slow somehow. Have anybody compared performance of KDE and GNOME that can say that one of them are faster??

[craig_mcd]

I have just switched to Gnome 2.2 from KDE 3.1 running on a PII 300Mhz with 196MB ram and I find it to be more responsive. Not that KDE was slow though.

I dont about using graphical file managers like nautilus, I use the terminal for just about everything.

btw - Gnome 2.2 is absolutely gorgeous

[Dolda2000]

Oh, yeah, just let me clarify myself here. It's not like I actually _use_ nautilus. It's just sometimes that I like to look at it, since it looks so good.
craig, could you please try to start some simple GNOME program like gnome-calculator from a warm cache and time it? I'd love to see how much user-mode CPU time it uses on your computer.

Btw., I'm using GNOME 2.0 on a 1400 MHz TBird, which is why I find it very strange that it would take as much as 0.2 seconds of active CPU time to start.

[shownuff001]

You are correct my friend. Gnome does take a long time to load and executing programs takes a while to load. Nautilus does drag. Sometimes its frustrating when trying to show of my penguin box to a friend and having the programs take 2-3 seconds to start, expecially a file explorer like Nautilus.

I have managed to load linux on my IPAQ using the familiar distribution and there is an option to have an app partially loaded in memory or maybe fully( dont have all the details) which causes the application to load instantly. I really like that feature for my opie media player.


regards,


show

[shownuff001]

I forgot to add that perhaps theres an option we can use to make this happen. ( load apps into memory), though we shouldnt have to do that.

[Dolda2000]

Once you have run a program once, it is already cached in memory. That is what is meant by warm cache. However, the thing is that GNOME programs seem to require a whole lot of processor power to start, since they take at least 0.2 seconds of active CPU time just to start.

[bmxface]

well the reason i stoped using Gnome was because of the **** load times. i preffer KDE over all the GUI's seems to be gereally quicker..other then browsers they can even still take a while but i find them faster then Gnome

[genlee]

Dolda, did you compile gnome?