Re: GNOME performance hit on 486?
Scott Au wrote:
>I've been itching to install Gnome both for the utilites as well the
>greater desktop control. I'm worried about the performance hit my box
>will take though with the increased graphical desktop (as compared to the
>simpler nature of IceWM). Anybody running a similar processor (I realize
>people running 700 Mhz Athlons aren't going to notice any difference) have
>any input to this matter? The 486 has 32M RAM and runs Netscape
>incredibly well compared to Windows 98 (which doesn't run at all on this
>system).
>From memory (I ran Gnome on a 16MB 486 before upgrading it to a K6-2/350)
the main performance hit was when Gnome applications started up. There
seemed to be a significant overhead involved in just setting up the GUI, and
this was especially noticeable when using the Control Center. Then again,
memory was always tight (especially when Netscape was running), so you may
well do better. I think there was also an issue with the image processing
library used by Gnome at the time (ImageMagic?) which seemed to take gobs of
memory and CPU cycles to do fairly minor things. I believe this has now been
replaced.
Ultimately the only way to find out if it will work is to try it. If you are
already running Netscape well enough on the box I don't think Gnome will be
too much for it.
Frank
Reply to: