[dev] DWM vs XFCE4 Memory Usage

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Roger

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Dec 5, 2011, 1:35:04 AM12/5/11
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Checking memory usage between XFCE4 and DWM, I find XFCE4 uses only ~30MB more then DWM.

100MB - DWM + Xorg
130MB - XFCE4


2x750 P3 w/ 1GB RAM

(I'm going to gander, Xorg uses around 60-70MB, with 20-30MB for other resources. Man Xorg is a beast on memory!)

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Roger
http://rogerx.freeshell.org/

hiro

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Dec 5, 2011, 3:26:44 AM12/5/11
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Yeah, Xorg barely runs on one of my PCs because of memory constraints.

Sime Ramov

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Dec 5, 2011, 4:24:16 AM12/5/11
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* Roger <roger...@gmail.com> [2011-12-04 21:35-0900]:

> (I'm going to gander, Xorg uses around 60-70MB, with 20-30MB for other
> resources. Man Xorg is a beast on memory!)

That's interesting, Xorg uses 28-30 MB on my (64 bit) system, plus 2844K
herbstluftwm (WM I use).

Roger

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Dec 5, 2011, 4:26:55 AM12/5/11
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> On Mon, Dec 05, 2011 at 09:26:44AM +0100, hiro wrote:
>Yeah, Xorg barely runs on one of my PCs because of memory constraints.
>

I can't believe xorg requires this much memory to run. I'm even using Gentoo
which has modular xorg packages, so only the parts of xorg I need are compiled
and installed.

I'll just bet, 7/8's of xorg deals with transparency eye candy (composite,
etc)!

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Roger
http://rogerx.freeshell.org/

Anthony Martin

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Dec 5, 2011, 4:40:24 AM12/5/11
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Roger <roger...@gmail.com> once said:
> Checking memory usage between XFCE4 and DWM,
> I find XFCE4 uses only ~30MB more then DWM.
>
> 100MB - DWM + Xorg
> 130MB - XFCE4
>
> 2x750 P3 w/ 1GB RAM
>
> (I'm going to gander, Xorg uses around 60-70MB,
> with 20-30MB for other resources. Man Xorg is a
> beast on memory!)

How did you measure this? I don't believe it.
These days dwm is considered tiny. Even Xorg
isn't that big compared to "modern" web browsers.

% uname -rms
Linux 3.1.4-1-ARCH i686

% grep '^Vm(Size|RSS)' /proc/`{pgrep X}^/status
VmSize: 21920 kB
VmRSS: 10036 kB

% grep '^Vm(Size|RSS)' /proc/`{pgrep dwm}^/status
VmSize: 5376 kB
VmRSS: 696 kB

Anthony

Bjartur Thorlacius

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Dec 5, 2011, 7:34:01 AM12/5/11
to d...@suckless.org, Roger
On Mon, 05 Dec 2011 06:35:04 -0000, Roger <roger...@gmail.com> wrote:
> (I'm going to gander, Xorg uses around 60-70MB, with 20-30MB for other
> resources. Man Xorg is a beast on memory!)
>
Note that clients can consume quite a lot of resources on the Xserver, and
the Xserver may be reluctant to free them when clients disconnect only to
malloc them again when new clients connect. Inspect xrestop statistics. It
is of course also easy to imagine that some information is duplicated due
to the networked client/server architecture of X11 where a Linux
framebuffer would not complicate things unnecessarily. But I would think
that the Xserver would push most of that information to the video memory
anyway.

-,Bjartur

Roger

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Dec 5, 2011, 12:17:54 PM12/5/11
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Oops. Forgot to add in my the number of Bash Shells and other running console
applications here. However, Xorg using 20-30MB is still seems like a huge
amount -- but isn't some of this off loaded to video ram?

Anyways, the man reason for posting was just to note the memory resource
difference between DWM and XFCE4. I still prefer DWM over XFCE4 as I can
easily manage it using keyboard.

--
Roger
http://rogerx.freeshell.org/

Christoph Lohmann

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Dec 5, 2011, 12:19:56 PM12/5/11
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Greetings.

Roger wrote:
>
> Anyways, the man reason for posting was just to note the memory resource
> difference between DWM and XFCE4. I still prefer DWM over XFCE4 as I can
> easily manage it using keyboard.

XFCE is infected by the dbus virus. So be careful and use condoms.


Sincerely,

Christoph Lohmann

Roger

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Dec 5, 2011, 2:16:51 PM12/5/11
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mmm... too late. Are my keys on my keyboard going to fall off now?

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Roger
http://rogerx.freeshell.org/

Roger

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Dec 5, 2011, 2:21:55 PM12/5/11
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> On Mon, Dec 05, 2011 at 06:19:56PM +0100, Christoph Lohmann wrote:

I see what you're saying, dbus is already pulled in here by some dumb other
packages. Dumb dependencies I'll never use! (... think hplip pulls it in, as
well as anything written using QT.)

Yes, on Gentoo here, I piped pretend emerge output of all the package
dependencies a package pulls in and saved to my /root, so I can easily
uninstall bloated applications.

--
Roger
http://rogerx.freeshell.org/

Kurt H Maier

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Dec 5, 2011, 2:36:57 PM12/5/11
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On Mon, Dec 5, 2011 at 2:21 PM, Roger <roger...@gmail.com> wrote:
> (... think hplip pulls it in, as well as anything written using QT.)

fyi hplip only needs dbus for the scan-to-fax functionality. if you
don't need that it will build without dbus just fine.

--
# Kurt H Maier

markus schnalke

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Dec 5, 2011, 3:17:02 PM12/5/11
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[2011-12-04 21:35] Roger <roger...@gmail.com>

> Checking memory usage between XFCE4 and DWM, I find XFCE4 uses only ~30MB more then DWM.
>
> 100MB - DWM + Xorg
> 130MB - XFCE4

I'm a bit confused: Doesn't XFCE set on top of Xorg?

Could someone please explain.


meillo

Roger

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Dec 5, 2011, 4:25:47 PM12/5/11
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~100MB - DWM + Xorg
~130MB - XFCE4 + Xorg

I, of course, already mentioned I forgot to isolate Xorg and as such, included
my other cli applications within the memory count.

--
Roger
http://rogerx.freeshell.org/

Roger

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Dec 5, 2011, 4:31:06 PM12/5/11
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There it is, x11-libs/qt-gui xfce-base/thunar depend on dbus.

XFCE4 itself doesn't depend on dbus, but only if a user pulls in thunar --
which then thunar does depend on dbus. I was wondering why installing xfce4
didn't automatically pull in thunar, now I know why!

--
Roger
http://rogerx.freeshell.org/

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