Re: efficiency of windows managers
On 9/27/07, Andrew Sackville-West <andrew@farwestbilliards.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Sep 27, 2007 at 04:41:12PM -0400, Manu Hack wrote:
> > On 9/27/07, Andy <1aw@gmx.de> wrote:
> > > Am Donnerstag, 27. September 2007 21:02 schrieb Manu Hack:
> > > > Hi all,
> > > >
> > > > I have a general question which I got when trying out different
> > > > windows managers/desktop environments. When I try to use windowmaker
> > > > (I wanted to make my computer faster as it's getting old), it
> > > > certainly is fast for initialization. But after that when around
> > > > 10-15 windows are opened and distributed in different workspaces, I
> > > > found moving around different workspaces and windows pretty slow (I
> > > > compared with KDE which I usually use.) and thus I still decided to
> > > > stick with KDE for the moment. Maybe the comparison is not fair as
> > > > KDE definitely needs longer time to initialize. But my question is,
> > > > is there a reason for that?
> > > >
> > > > Manu
> > > You might need more RAM
> >
> > I agree. :) But I'm still confused as to why KDE can outperform (at
> > least up to my experience) a supposedly light weight wm (maybe
> > windowmaker is not lightweight enough, will try fluxbox later) on the
> > same machine. Is that because of something like memory management or
> > something like that?
>
> its probably got more to do with memory *use* than management. By that
> I mean, you may end up wasting memory by using kde apps within a
> different wm. The kde apps will load up whole bunches of kde libs in
> order to function in addition to the libs used by whatever wm you're
> using. You haven't said what your 10-15 windows are doing, so I'm only
> guessing. Also, it what ways does kde perform better than windowmaker?
> is it in overall response of the system? screen drawing? window
> dragging? just switching from one app to another within the same
> workspace?
More windows are pretty standard, like gaim, iceweasel, icedove,
xchat, amule, etc. The thing happened is that whenever I need to move
to a workspace with more than 3 windows already there, it takes
seconds to "reload" and always give me a window on top which is not
previous on the top. I don't know why but it never happened in KDE or
Xfce.
>
> >
> > The reason I'm asking is that I want to change because before I
> > thought I can improve the efficiency by using a more lightweight wm
> > but it turns out it's not true in my case. So maybe as long as the
> > memory is enough to use KDE (or GNOME), KDE can be faster than those
> > lightweight wm because they use more memory?
>
> you should do some more comprehensive testing to see if you can figure
> out what's going on. keep an eye on a top instance or two and sort
> them by processor usage and memory usage. That will give some
> insight.
Yeah, will do if I have the time. But at the moment I'm very happy
with xfce4.4 (fast and with the real transparency stuff). :)
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