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Desktop memory usage comparison

[Posted September 13, 2006 by cook]

Lubos Lunak has documented a comparison of memory usage with four popular desktop environments running a variety of applications. "These memory benchmarks are meant to measure various cases of desktop configuration and compare KDE to some other desktop environments. Specifically, I compared against Xfce 4.2.2 (as shipped with SUSE Linux 10.0) as the so-called lightweight desktop, WindowMaker 0.92.0 as a plain window manager and GNOME. GNOME, built using GARNOME, was originally version 2.12.2, later redoing it with 2.14.0 (without actually measuring noticeable difference in these specific cases, despite 2.14 release notes claiming performance improvements). As I no longer have the same setup I cannot redo it with the very recent 2.16 unfortunately. Simply consider this to be a bit old. The others are for comparison anyway :). KDE itself was KDE 3.5.2 with my performance patches, all of which are already upstream by now." (Thanks to Alexander Neundorf.)

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Posted Sep 18, 2006 21:01 UTC (Mon) by hein.zelle (guest, #33324) [Link]

Interesting comparison. As an XFCE user with the typical case identical to the loose-case at the end (firefox, openoffice.org and thunderbird) I was kind of expecting the memory usage to be worse than an all-KDE or all-gnome solution. Looking back at my reasons for running those applications (at work) though, it's not really a fair comparison: it's mostly related to functionality where interaction with customers pretty much requires openoffice, firefox is the de-facto standard apart from IE, and I just plain prefered thunderbird as a graphical mail client.

These days I'm pretty much obliged to run kontact to be able to access our common calendar (kolab). If I either use mutt or kontact for my email (as I do now) and would be willing to switch to konqueror from firefox, I'd be highly surprised (given the numbers in this article) if xfce didn't beat the memory use of a colleague's kde desktop with konqueror, kontact and openoffice.

All in all I think the point about the KDE libraries not being too bad is true if you run at least 2 kde applications, in which case the damage is divided. To suggest that XFCE looses there is not really fair though, as it is very possible to use xfce combined with the same kde applications, and still use less memory.

Desktop memory usage comparison

Posted Sep 21, 2006 15:29 UTC (Thu) by leandro (guest, #1460) [Link]

Very interesting, it flies in the face of the perception of some colleagues of mine. Perhaps the cluttered default appearance of KDE impairs the perception of it lightness? Or could it be that it has less bloat, but worse response times? Or that he was just working with a more up-to-date KDE than Gnome?

Desktop memory usage comparison

Posted Sep 21, 2006 18:03 UTC (Thu) by boudewijn (subscriber, #14185) [Link]

More likely, you colleagues are just seeing what they think they would
see, and haven't done any real testing. That, or they use Firefox and
OpenOffice everywhere and those two mastodonts just drown out any
perceivable difference.

Desktop memory usage comparison

Posted Sep 25, 2006 0:59 UTC (Mon) by leandro (guest, #1460) [Link]

More likely, you colleagues are just seeing what they think they would see

I doubt so, at least one of them is a hardcore KDE user.