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Location: Beech Creek, Pennsylvania, United States

Sunday, October 08, 2006

RAM usage by different os and window managers

I decided to do a test on how much RAM different operating systems and window managers take-up on a computer right after startup. Note that all of these operating systems had fair playing ground because I decided to use them in parallels and not on my actual machine and allocated them all 256 MB of RAM. For my first test I tried Windows XP light. It took up 95 MB of RAM. I decided not to try the original copy of Windows XP because I knew it would take way more RAM than what I was looking for an operating system.


Next I decided I would switch to a Linux operating system. I chose Ubuntu Edgy to do my tests on. With the gnome window manager it use 74 MB of RAM. I was not too impressed with that considering that Windows XP light only took up 95 makes him which is only slightly more than gnome takes up. Bare in mind that in Linux I decided to use the gnome system stats monitor to do all of my recordings of RAM usage. The next window manager I tried was KDE. Not surprisingly it took a more RAM than gnome but less RAM than Windows. It took up a total of 80 MB of RAM.


Afterwards I decided to try some lightweight window managers in Ubuntu to see how much RAM usage they would take up. The first one I tried was XFCE. I suspected it would take up a lot less RAM than it did. Surprisingly it took up a total of 68.1 MB of RAM. Which is only slightly less than amount of RAM gnome took up. I guess I should not be as shocked as I was to find out how much RAM XFCE took considering that it is built on the GTK2 framework. Next I decided to try icewm. It is quite a bit different than the other window managers in Linux. It is a little more difficult to set up however it is very intuitive to use. Icewm stores all the settings in text files that can be edited. It's actually not very hard to use once you get used to it. Icewm also looked like it was straight out of 1995. But that's fine because it came in a minuscule 52.7 MB of RAM which is far superior to any of the other window managers in Linux and its especially better than Windows RAM usage. So there you have it, icewm came in first. XFCE came in second. Gnome came in third. KDE came in forth. Last and certainly least was Windows XP light.


It was hard for me to figure out a fair way to test the boot times in the different operating systems without actually installing each one individually on my machine. I will give you a rough estimate of how fast they were. It's hard for me to test a startup speed between Ubuntu in Windows XP light I actually don't know which one was faster owned boot. My guess would be Ubuntu but only slightly. However within the window managers it was clear that icewm was the fastest and did not require any time to load. Then gnome and XFCE only required a small amount of time and a splash screen. In last was KDE which took a little while at a splash screen.

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