[openbox] recommended WM using low resources?

[Dana Jansens]

On Thu, Oct 13, 2011 at 9:43 PM, Globe Trotter <itsme_410 at yahoo.com> wrote:

> Hi,
>
> Thanks very much for your detailed e-mail! I am trying to live in a non-DE
> world, so I thought I would cast my net and see which of the four (FVWM, OB,
> FB, PekWM, or something else) I should consider.
>
> I use my desktop for almost everything but also for routine, quite heavy
> computation. I would therefore like to have the background processes to have
> low memory footprint and CPU usage if possible, while not giving up a whole
> lot of functionality.
>

FWIW, no window manager will use significant CPU resources while you are not
interacting with it, and things in the background will get swapped if a
process wants to use more memory.


>
> That in a nutshell is what I am pursuing. I am thankful to the discussion
> so far.
>
> Best wishes!
>
> --- On Thu, 10/13/11, Jesús J. Guerrero Botella <
> jesus.guerrero.botella at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
> > Unless something changed in the last few years (and I doubt
> > that) twm
> > is incredibly horrible when it comes to memory usage. It's
> > probably
> > suboptimal in cpu as well, but I never tested that.
> >
> > About speed, it's hard to guess... It all depends on what
> > exactly we
> > measure. I bet fvwm and openbox are probably much faster
> > when it comes
> > to mapping windows. But that's only a part of managing
> > windows. A
> > window manager does a lot of tasks and benchmarks usually
> > look at
> > whatever their writer(s) want it to show about their
> > favourite WM.
> >
> > In any case, twm can't do anything. There are much smaller
> > WMs that
> > have a much smaller memory footprint. Compile time options
> > also matter
> > here, and architecture. In the case of fvwm, and due to its
> > modular
> > nature, the user configuration matters *a whole lot*.
> > Running fvwm
> > without extra modules, without svg support, no background
> > and the
> > standard menu can be done below 1mb or ram, probably. But
> > that can
> > quickly grow into a few dozen mb's provided you are
> > creative enough.
> >
> > The *boxes are probably somewhere between 1 and 4 mb, but
> > as said that
> > can greatly vary depending on a number of factors.
> >
> > These numbers are what I remember from my own tests on an
> > amd64/x86
> > box a few years ago, using Gentoo.
> >
> > Without knowing if the original poster is pursuing any
> > concrete info
> > or goal I can't really say anything more useful.
> >
> > Cheers :)
> > --
> > Jesús Guerrero Botella
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> > openbox at icculus.org
> > http://icculus.org/mailman/listinfo/openbox
> >
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