[Wylug-help] Windows manager and low resources consumption

[Frank Shute]

On Wed, Oct 23, 2002 at 06:30:15PM +0100, Rina & Corrado wrote:
>
>   Hy all.
>
> I was wondering, which is the window manager, which uses the lowest
> amount of resources (memory, cpu ...).
>
> At the present I am using blackbox, which seems quite fine, but I would
> like to hear from people using other windows managers.
>
> I decided to switch from KDE (which is a desktop manager more than a
> windows manager) to BlackBox in order to improve performances. Having
> heard BlackBox is the fastest and less hungry, I tried, and I have to
> say the result is really successful. Before deciding, I got a
> non-extensive look, without proper mesurements, to xcfe, Gnome,
> ICEwm,Enlightment, sawfish.
>
> I am really interested to hear other opinions because, in order to build
> a system with low power consuption and (relatively) good performances, I
> am trying to select the packages with the lowest resources' consumption.

I use Blackbox myself but 2 that might be less resource intensive are
twm & fvwm. I think twm was one of the original window managers for X.

Obviously less functional than Blackbox and I can't imagine that the
power consumption is significantly less than Blackbox!

I think you'll find that twm ships with Xfree.

Some numbers:

$ ls -l /usr/local/bin/blackbox
-rwxr-xr-x  1 root  wheel  1187590 Nov  2  2001 /usr/local/bin/blackbox

$ ls -l /usr/X11R6/bin/twm
-rwxr-xr-x  1 root  wheel  134112 Mar 22  2001 /usr/X11R6/bin/twm

Blackbox:

CPU states:  2.3% user,  0.0% nice,  1.6% system,  0.8% interrupt, 95.3% idle
Mem: 37M Active, 79M Inact, 19M Wired, 2256K Cache, 29M Buf, 49M Free
Swap: 388M Total, 388M Free

PID USERNAME PRI NICE  SIZE    RES STATE    TIME   WCPU    CPU COMMAND

5564 frank      2   0  2472K  2048K select   0:00  0.00%  0.00% blackbox

twm:

CPU states:  2.3% user,  0.0% nice,  1.2% system,  0.0% interrupt, 96.5% idle
Mem: 35M Active, 79M Inact, 19M Wired, 2256K Cache, 29M Buf, 52M Free
Swap: 388M Total, 388M Free

PID USERNAME PRI NICE  SIZE    RES STATE    TIME   WCPU    CPU COMMAND

5834 frank      2   0  2480K  2076K select   0:00  0.00%  0.00% twm

No significant difference on this machine I'm afraid. Whereas:

5979 frank      2   0 19168K 18608K select   0:37  2.98%  2.98% XF86_Mach64

so if you got rid of X....but then why punish yourself to save a bit
of memory and CPU unless you've got really old hardware (this box is
4-5 yrs old)?

--

 Frank

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