Resource usage was: introduction

[B. Henry]

I am reffering to both minimum hardware requirements and comparing the desktops on the same hardware.
Linux in general will use as much RAM as is available up to the point where performance is optimal, and then use swap space. 
This is a good thing of course as RAM is much faster than reading from and writing to disk. 
Older windows would use the windows equibalent of swap more than it should have for optimal performance. 
When I had only 1gig of RAM unity used a lot of swap space, and even gnome2.x had programs swapping stuff out of course. 
I could tell the difference in performance between a machine with 1GB and another with 1.5GB with identical specs other than that.
I avoid multitasking in the GUI more than most, and for me it appears that 1.5GB is the oint where adding more RAM has little if any effect on 
performance with Desktops like XFCE, or Mate. Of course that would not be true if one keeps several windows open with resource hungry aps. 
There are other things that effect memory consumption of course as well, notably   non executable data is cached, so if you open many different files 
you chip away...
I was running 32bit OSs BTW on the machines with 1 and 1.5gigs of RAM, not sure if usage would vary enough to change my observations if they had run 
64bit opperating systems.
Unity certainly will benefit from more memory. KDE is supposed to be rather resource hungry, but I've never run it.
If you do not multitask 3GB is enough RAM to avoid most need for swap on 64bit systems running gnome and even Unity for me, and personally I don't think 
I would benefit often at all from more than 4GB of RAM.
Of course your mileage may vary, and through in a program with memory leaks and everything goes to hell.
  
  
 

-- 
     B.H.
   Registerd Linux User 521886


  kendell clark wrote:
Fri, Mar 18, 2016 at 12:33:10AM -0500

> hi
> One thing I've noticed about mate, and probably other desktops as well,
> is that they seem to have some kind of algorithm for measuring how much
> ram a system has and adjusting how they use ram accordingly. On my
> system, which has 8 gb of it, mate isn't all that resource efficient in
> the ram department, usually idling at around 700 to 800 mb used.
> However, on my mac and on mellisa's toshiba, mate idles at around 350 mb
> used, and there's zero difference in performance. Gnome and unity
> probably do the same thing, but they also use more effects so can be a
> little heavier on the system. The biggest problem with unity and gnome
> is, my opinion only, cpu usage. They use up a lot of the cpu cycles if
> you have a slow one, and that can make the thing feel sluggish or
> unresponsive. It's why I switched from gnome to mate on my mac, gnome
> did not like my mac much.
> Thanks
> Kendell Clark
> 
> 
> B. Henry wrote:
> > It is something specific to your system if mate term is faster. It's as close to the same thing as is possible, was actually the exact same size, and 
> > had 0 differences one time when I dcompared.
> > Thunderbird  works perfectly with unity. It sounds like something is messed up, corrupted or badly configured if you are having the problems mentiioned, 
> > Jude.
> > Gnome is notably lighter than unity when it comes to RAM usage.
> >
> >  
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> 
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