REALITY CHECK: Resource usage of gnome

[Chris Evans <chris ferret lmh ox ac uk>]

Hi,

Gnome is looking _very_ good, especially in the panel department.

Unfortunately it appears to be a resource hog. I make a habit of
periodically booting with mem=8M (or even mem=4M) to make sure various
bits of linux don't succumb to the hideous code bloat of certain M$
operating systems.

With mem=8M, I can load the fvwm2 "AnotherLevel" desktop of RH5.0, at
1024x768x16bpp, and it feels very snappy. I can fire up gimp and do some
brief editing, it is fine to use.

With mem=8M and trying to start gnome, things are not so good. The panel
seems to demand ~4Mb RSS when it can. 4Mb ffs! And things are generally
sluggish.

Ignoring the memory requirements, the general rendering speed of gnome is
a bit lacking. For example contrast the sluggish speed of gtk+ based menu
drawing and refresh, with the razor-sharp precision and speed of the menu
present in the fvwm2 button-bar present in "AnotherLevel".

I think gtk's main flaw is inefficient expose redrawing and resizing and
general slowness in rendering things. The worst example I have seen is
when my friend built up ICEWm which uses opaque window resize. He then
showed me resizing the gmc window (in full size icon mode), and the thing
went into a frenzy of flickery redrawing. Probably a full redraw of the
window contents every time the window caught a resize event. 

We all know Linux is much faster than Win95/NT, its a shame when our
graphical environment does not give this impression.

The above comments cause no troubles for me personally; I have a
relatively quick/powerful machine, soon to be even more so. I just hope we
can continue to cater for lower-end users.

Cheers
Chris