Results 1 to 6 of 6
I've been playing with getting XFCE installed on my netbook, under Ubuntu 9.04, and every time I've done it, I noticed that XFCE ends up using 20MB more RAM than ...
- 10-04-2009 #1Linux Newbie
- Join Date
- Jul 2008
- Location
- Anaheim, CA
- Posts
- 114
XFCE ends up using 20MB more RAM than GNOME
I've been playing with getting XFCE installed on my netbook, under Ubuntu 9.04, and every time I've done it, I noticed that XFCE ends up using 20MB more RAM than GNOME does. I'm not sure why, but I'm a little curious, as XFCE is supposed to be a "lightweight" WM. Might the fact I installed it via the xubuntu-desktop package have anything to do with this fact? So far as I know, it's only XFCE that does this. I've tried LXDE, and it came out using 40MB less RAM than my GNOME session.
- 10-04-2009 #2Linux Guru
- Join Date
- Nov 2007
- Location
- NH, USA
- Posts
- 3,149
Contrary to popular belief, xfce desktop isn't THAT lightweight. What I'm guessing is that some of the gnome stuff is being loaded into memory still even though you are using XFCE desktop, because it has the option to load gnome stuff. I would look at the output of top and sort by memory to see the highest usage items.
- 10-04-2009 #3forum.guy
- Join Date
- May 2004
- Location
- arch linux
- Posts
- 18,088
Yup, I've found that to be true in my own eperience. Each time I install XFCE, it's almost as big as a Gnome install, and yet it doesn't seem to have near the features and polish that Gnome gives. For whatever reason, it does always feel a little faster than Gnome, though.
Originally Posted by coopstah13 
That said, I've never installed XFCE and found it to be bigger than a Gnome install. Not sure why that would be happening.oz
→ new members/users: read this first | new member faq
→ no private messages requesting computer support - post them on the forums!
→ please use the "report post" button to alert our forum admins to problematic posts rather than responding to them yourself.
- 10-04-2009 #4Linux Guru
- Join Date
- Feb 2009
- Location
- Boston, MA
- Posts
- 4,651
Xubuntu in particular is a very memory intensive implementation of XFCE. Distrowatch did a comparison awhile ago between Debian Lenny with XFCE and Xubuntu, and Lenny weighed in at less than half the memory usage of Xubuntu.
Mostly because Xubuntu starts a good deal of services and does load a bunch of GNOME libraries.
- 10-04-2009 #5Linux Newbie
- Join Date
- Jul 2008
- Location
- Anaheim, CA
- Posts
- 114
Ah, ok. That'll explain it, reed9. I'll just try the xfce-4 package, and the xfapplet package (so I can use the GNOME volume applet), and see how that does, and post back.
Nope, the xfce4 package still takes more than GNOME, but only 10MB.
- 10-04-2009 #6Linux Guru
- Join Date
- Feb 2009
- Location
- Boston, MA
- Posts
- 4,651
Perhaps the follow up article will be helpful.
DistroWatch.com: Put the fun back into computing. Use Linux, BSD.
Reply With Quote 
Posting Permissions
- You may not post new threads
- You may not post replies
- You may not post attachments
- You may not edit your posts
