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Aaron

Member

From: PA, USA

Registered: 2007-12-19

Posts: 108

Website

Gnome or KDE apps under XFCE4, Performance Questions

Hello, I've always wondered how much impact running extra libraries actually has on performance?

For instance, I like both Gnome and XFCE4, but as of now I only run XFCE4 and am very picky on which packages to install because of dependencies.  I steer clear of the kde packages as well.

I currently am running an AMD 64 3000+ with 250gb internal hard drive, 250 external, but only 1-gig of ram.

How much of a performance hit will I suffer if I were to install a program with gnome dependencies, or kde dependencies, while running XFCE4 as my only desktop environment?

Hard disk space is not an issue, I can live with the extra space required by the libraries, but my ram is the bottleneck.

I've been trying to keep a pure XFCE4 system, but some programs that I like such as opera have qt dependencies.

dante4d

Member

From: Czech Republic

Registered: 2007-04-14

Posts: 176

Re: Gnome or KDE apps under XFCE4, Performance Questions

I'm running dual core 1,6GHz with 1GB ram. Using KDEmod and bunch of gnome apps. I have 900+MB ram usage all the time but everything is pretty smooth. You need both gtk/qt gnome/kde libs loaded at the same time which is probably just handful of MBs overhead. It would mostly depend on what you combine but I wouldn't see big deal in that.

For example firefox by itself is huge problem . It consumes hundreds of MBs of memory just for dozen of tabs.

Schpariel

Member

Registered: 2007-08-24

Posts: 25

Re: Gnome or KDE apps under XFCE4, Performance Questions

I recommend using GTK+ apps under XFCE, XFCE also uses GTK+ which means that most of the needed libraries are already loaded, so performance and start-up time will be much better.

Opera/Firefox are exceptions, because these don't have any KDE/GNOME dependencies, they just depend on QT3/GTK - which isn't that bad compared to apps that pull libgnome/kdelibs as a dependency.

With 1 GB RAM, memory usage isn't an issue though, start-up time with non-GTK applications is much more annoying, and you could solve that by loading the gnome/kde daemons on startup.

Mantaar

Member

Registered: 2007-12-17

Posts: 70

Re: Gnome or KDE apps under XFCE4, Performance Questions

Hello, I've always wondered how much impact running extra libraries actually has on performance?

Libraries typically don't 'run' in that way. They get loaded into memory. So you're usually just using up memory. You might say that when you call a routine inside a library, that library 'runs', but that's rather fuzzy... not many libraries actually create threads that would run, so it's not the libs that are creating overhead, but the programs. If the programs depend on heavyweight libs (such as QT or GTK) that does have an impact on performance (most notably on memory, but also on CPU-cycles), but with Linux I've generally experienced that impact to be low.

For instance, I like both Gnome and XFCE4, but as of now I only run XFCE4 and am very picky on which packages to install because of dependencies

Why? (are you so picky)

I steer clear of the kde packages as well.

You might want to change that once KDE4 is out - it has a much lighter footprint than Gnome.

I currently am running an AMD 64 3000+ with 250gb internal hard drive, 250 external, but only 1-gig of ram.

So what? One gig of RAM is plenty for a linux system. Give it another 2 gig of Swap and you won't have any problems even with a full blown KDE3 environment. Even less so with XFCE4 or KDE4.

How much of a performance hit will I suffer if I were to install a program with gnome dependencies, or kde dependencies, while running XFCE4 as my only desktop environment?

Since the biggest libs in Gnome are the GTK libs and XFCE depends on them, I've always wondered why people consider XFCE to be so much lighter - probably because of Nautilus - and Nautilus really is quite heavy, but not too much. But I don't like the style of Gnome overall, plus they seem to be just incompetent in designing slick GUIs. Try to open /usr/bin in Firefox's "Open File" dialog (which is GTK) and then try the same in Opera or Konqueror. Notice a difference? (note that the kernel may have cached the inodes, so I suggest you first try it with Opera/Konqueror and then with Firefox. Even when the inodes are cached, GTK's dialog performs a lot worse than the QT one without caching of the inodes).

That said, a Gnome app won't hit you as hard as KDE app when you're running XFCE. Since XFCE is basically a trimmed-down Gnome and they depend on the same libs and services, launching Gnome apps under KDE is no big business. But KDE would need to start its background services first (kioslaves, kdeinit, kbuildsycoca...) and load the QT3 libs. Quite a bit, actually - you'd be running two environments instead of one.

Hard disk space is not an issue, I can live with the extra space required by the libraries, but my ram is the bottleneck.

Why do you think so? I'm on one gig of RAM, too, and I don't have any problems (OK, I run XMonad... but even with KDE3 I didn't have any RAM problems whatsoever.)

I've been trying to keep a pure XFCE4 system, but some programs that I like such as opera have qt dependencies.

Well, that's not all that bad. As I've said, they're not really eating that much away - Opera is not a KDE application and does not depend on all those daemons to be running in the background - so on your XFCE-system, Opera is actually much lighter than, say, Konqueror. But even that wouldn't be too bad overall - I think one Gig of RAM is still sufficient for a modern-day Linux system. It's not Vista, remember?

---

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Aaron

Member

From: PA, USA

Registered: 2007-12-19

Posts: 108

Website

Re: Gnome or KDE apps under XFCE4, Performance Questions

Thanks for the replies everyone, all my questions were answered very thoroughly.

I will keep an eye on kde4, and try it once it's released.

skottish

Forum Fellow

From: Here

Registered: 2006-06-16

Posts: 7,942

Re: Gnome or KDE apps under XFCE4, Performance Questions

You can also look into the window manager method. I'm running E17 with both QT4 and GTK2 libraries running. I'm currently showing 1.68GB in use with over 1.33GB of that cached. This means that this setup would run great with 1GB of RAM, and even probably with 512MB.