Re: [OT] Why does X need so much CPU power?

[paul@mackinney.net]

Neal Lippman declaimed:
> I'm just wondering if anyone has any info on why X seems to need so much
> CPU power?
> 
> Way back when, probably around 1996 or 1997, I first tried to install
> Linux. Back then, I tried distro's from Corel and Redhat. My system was
> a Pentium 133 with 48 (and then 96) MB Ram. This system ran both Win 95
> and Win NT 4.0 reasonably well, but when I made the switch and installed
> Linux, any sort of desktop - eg Gnome or KDE, not a vanilla WM) was just
> so slow as to be unusable. Eventually I gave up for a while and went
> back to WinNT for some time.
> 
> For the past 3 years or so, my workstation has been exclusively Linux,
> first Mandrake on a PIII-800, and for the last year, I've been hooked on
> Debian on an Athlon XP 1700+, and on both of those systems performance
> has been just fine, so I didn't really think about the troubles I
> originally had, and when I did, I figured I must have done something
> wrong on my first install attempts on the Pentium system.
> 
> A few months ago, I decided to put debian on my old Laptop, an IBM
> Thinkpad 770ED (PII-266, 64MB Ram). Once again, with KDE running, the
> desktop was so slow and unresponsive as to be really unusable (except in
> an xterm window). This is a system that has run Win95, Win98, and WinNT
> just fine over the years.
> 
> So, my question is: Why does X seem to need so much more CPU power than
> windows - such that systems I have tried to use that worked fine with
> various windows flavors just were unusable with KDE loaded? I assume the
> problem isn't in Linux itself, since my old Pentium 133 was just fine
> with X not running, and enough people have attested to the ability of
> systems with Pentium processors running Linux without X being able to
> handle massive firewall, router, web server duties, etc. Maybe the
> problem is KDE and not X - but I had similar trouble with Gnome, so it
> isn't just a KDE issue.
> 
> I'm just curious and wonder if anyone has any thoughts.
> 

Clearly we all think that it's the Window Manager, not X. My history
with various window managers:

Tried Gnome, too big, too broken. 
Tried KDE, too slow. 
Tried Window Maker, nice but config editor was broken. 
Tried Blackbox and haven't ever wanted to look further.

YMMV, Paul
-- 
Paul Mackinney
paul@mackinney.net