Speeding up KDE? Any hints?

[Brendan]

On Sunday 15 July 2007, D. Michael McIntyre wrote:
> On Sunday 15 July 2007, Robert Tilley wrote:
> > My Kubuntu 7 KDE desktop is running as slowly as a Windows box with a bad
> > registry.
> >
> > Can anyone throw out some helpful hints for improvements?
>
> Usually this is RAM-related in some way.  Not enough RAM, too many
> applications running for the RAM you have, buggy applications with memory
> leaks.  Nothing bogs down KDE faster than heavy swap activity.
>
> One easy way to look for this is to run kinfocenter and look at the Memory
> tab.  See if you see a lot of activity here.  If you do, it could explain
> the slow system.
>
> If not, it could also be networking-related.  KDE can have weird problems
> if your local domain is busted in various ways, and applications will sit
> there for five eternities before starting normally, then they might balk
> like this periodically, depending on what they are.
>
> It could just be a good old fashioned slow computer too.  KDE is pretty
> greedy, and a lot of people make the mistake of thinking that Linux with a
> full blown modern desktop like KDE should run on a 386-33 with 16K of RAM,
> because it's Linux, and Linux works great on old computers.

Before you go into all these wild and crazy ideas, just try moving your .kde 
dir out of the way and running a clean copy or clean user in KDE. See if it 
is something in your KDE setup...