Bug 271629

Summary: Option to Preload All of Base KDE into RAM
Product: [I don't know] kde Reporter: Jay LaCroix <jay>
Component: generalAssignee: Unassigned bugs mailing-list <unassigned-bugs>
Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE    
Severity: wishlist CC: lamarque
Priority: NOR    
Version: unspecified   
Target Milestone: ---   
Platform: Unlisted Binaries   
OS: Linux   
Latest Commit: Version Fixed In:
Sentry Crash Report:

Description Jay LaCroix 2011-04-24 17:35:09 UTC 
Version:           unspecified (using KDE 4.6.2) 
OS:                Linux

I'm really impressed with the direction KDE is going, and I had a wish I wanted to pitch. (I searched for this but didn't find it so I assume no one else suggested this).

I think it would be wonderful if a future KDE release had an option to preload all of KDE into RAM to make the desktop faster. Perhaps after the user logs in at the KDM screen, KDE will immediately start preloading each component into RAM in the background. 

Of course, this would only be for KDE base components, and not non-Qt apps like Firefox. Perhaps this would automatically take effect if the user has a certain amount of RAM on their system, or they turn the option on in System Settings. Also, other KDE apps that are not automatically included (like Blogilo or Choqok for example) could be selected in System Settings to add them to the preload. Finally, this would be independent of daemons such as ureadahead.

Given that mainstream laptops now days come with 4GB of RAM or more (my laptop has 8GB) I think this is a great way to take advantage and make KDE faster than it already is. 

As far as ksysguard would display the preloaded instances of KDE applications, perhaps preloaded instances would have a monochrome grey icon in the process list to show that it is preloaded but not actually in use.

Reproducible: Didn't try
Comment 1 Lamarque V. Souza 2011-04-25 19:49:11 UTC 
I think using suspend to disk instead of computer shutdown is be a better alternative. It works for (almost) every program, not only KDE's, and does not need too much changes in programs, just a few lines of code to reset some internal variables when resuming.

I use TuxOnIce in my Linux notebooks for years and it works is great. Differently from the stock suspend to disk in Linux kernel, TuxOnIce also tries to save the disk cache, so when you wake up it is like you had the whole program (and its data) loaded into memory. The disk activity to load de RAM image during resming process is also optimized by compressing it during suspend and since it is loaded sequentially from the disk it is faster then if we loaded individual programs.
Comment 2 Christoph Feck 2011-04-29 19:21:39 UTC 

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 257539 ***