Howto Improve Performance?

[Peter Garrett]

On Fri, 8 Jul 2005 17:29:30 +0100
Lee Braiden <lee_b at digitalunleashed.com> wrote:

> On Friday 08 Jul 2005 17:24, Ben Novack wrote:
> > XFCE's very gnome-like in a lot of ways, but faster, from what I've
> > heard. It's still GTK+ powered, so I'm actually quite curious as to
> > whether it offers a substantial speed boost over gnome.
> 
> I keep hearing about these "fast" window managers.  But all they do is manage 
> windows, after all.  I can't imagine them being much faster, except if you're 
> low on memory and can't afford to run many GUI programs at once.

As an experiment, I installed Hoary on a Pentium 200mmx , 64 MB RAM. I used the "server" install, then apt-get to install x-window-system-core , xterm and some "lightweight" apps. This machine quite definitely *cannot* run gnome effectively, unless you can put up with very slow and sluggish performance. I installed my own compiled Fluxbox .deb package, which ran fine. As a further experiment, I installed the Hoary version of xfce4. It runs quite well on this old machine - certainly there is a slight performance hit compared to Fluxbox, but I was pleasantly surprised.
> 
> If you do run more than two or three programs at once, though, you're probably 
> better off with a proper, integrated desktop, which shares as many libraries 
> as possible between it all, thereby cutting down memory use.

I don't really follow this paragraph. If one is using for example gtk2 and gtk 1.2 apps, surely the libraries are shared no matter what window manager/ desktop environment is in use? Please enlighten me ! 

Peter