KDE4 system utilization in FreeBSD vs. SuSE 11

[David Gurvich]

The system that I'm doing this on is a Thinkpad T23 with 1GB ram and 1Ghz P3.

I've tried KDE4 as the ports tree now has packages for 7-STABLE and
found that plasma+xorg is a resource hog.   When I look in top I see
xorg + plasma each using 20% of the cpu and a large portion of the
ram.  Opening up konqueror for kde4 slows the system very noticeably
and closing konqueror leaves a zombie process.  Konqueror for kde3
does not have the same effect and is quite useable.  The laptop is
unable to go to the lower cpu frequency and is almost unuseable.

I've now booted from the SuSE 11 KDE4 livecd.  X + plasma + konqueror
+ konsole + networkmanager is using less than 20% cpu and 70% of the
ram.  512K ram is being used as  a ramdisk and the other 200K is being
used to run KDE4. SuSE has many services running and seems to have no
issues doing so as the cpu frequency is at the lowest setting.  In
fact, the cpu frequency has not budged from the lowest setting. The
system is as responsive running from the livecd using KDE4 as FreeBSD
using KDE3 from the hard drive.

Here is a comparison of memory use between KDE4 and KDE3,
http://www.kdedevelopers.org/node/3138.  The conclusion from that is
KDE4 applications require less memory than KDE3 applications.  Am I
doing something wrong that causes such a discrepancy?