Why is KDE so slow?
KDE requires some memory and CPU horsepower, even under Linux, *BSD, etc. However there are issuses specific to Cygwin which also slow it down. There are certain POSIX calls which can’t be mapped directly to Win32 calls (e.g. select, fork) and these can have a significant overhead. In particular, fork() is very slow under Cygwin. There are indeed some optimisations that could be made; but these will be added in later alpha releases. Currently we are focussing on stability rather than speed and this is no small task. NB: sometimes an application can crash and end up going into an “endless loop”; CPU usage will be at 100% for an extended period of time. If this occurs, close the offending application from Task Manager and your other applications should become more responsive. Please report any crashes or lock-ups to the kde-cygwin developers.
