[openbox] recommended WM using low resources?

Jesús J. Guerrero Botella jesus.guerrero.botella at gmail.com
Thu Oct 13 10:33:12 EDT 2011


2011/10/11 Dana Jansens <dana at orodu.net>:
> On Tue, Oct 11, 2011 at 8:43 AM, Globe Trotter <itsme_410 at yahoo.com> wrote:
>>
>> Hi,
>>
>> Sorry if this is considered to be a little OT, but is there a more recent
>> study which has analysed Which WM is best in terms of low use of resources?
>> OB/PekWM/BB/FB/FVWM/IceWM, etc?
>
> I expect TWM would be much lower than all the above.

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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