RE: Milestones document

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

On Tue, 7 Dec 1999, Poletti, Don wrote:
> Speaking of memory,
> 
> I have not used Gnome much many because on my system it seems
> considerablly slower than Windoze. One of main reasons as far as I
> can tell is due to memory. I have 32 megs and while that is not alot
> by todays standards it should be more than sufficient to bring up
> a desktop and an app or three.
>

GNOME isn't going to like 32 megs very much. My impression is that KDE
doesn't either; there is just too much "stuff."
 
Well, you could probably run a basic GNOME setup, OR Netscape, OR some
largish GNOME apps like Gnumeric. But not all at once very well.

> 1) How much Memory does Gnome use?

It depends on what components you use, what window manager, whether you
use pixmap-based themes (these will kill you), etc. 

> 2) How can I minimize memory usage?

The two biggest chunks are Netscape and pixmap themes (for GTK or E). Kill
those. Then, you can try a small window manager. Also, be sure to use "New
terminal" from existing gnome-terminals instead of starting new
gnome-terminal processes. Also, use a solid color background instead
of a picture. Those things will help a lot.

> 3) Is there a conscience effort in development to minimize memory?

Only to keep it reasonable. The whole thing, with some apps, should run
well in 64 megs. It is probably slow-but-usable in 32 if you strip it down
a bit.

Keep in mind that there is almost always a size/speed tradeoff. That is,
we can almost always make things faster by using more memory - assuming
you have the memory to use. :-) So there is some cost to making things too
small.

> 4) Is there some other reason Linux/gnome/E is slower than Windoze?
> 

Specific things may be slower, others are faster. If you're talking about
the panel-menu-coming-up issue, then find the "Keep menus in memory"
option. If you're talking about opaque window resize, it isn't really
slow, it just flickers. Turn off opaque resize if it bothers you.

> In other forums similar questions have led to "buy more memory" my 
> response to that is that windoze runs well in 32 megs why can't
> linux/gnome/E?
> 

Things are set up differently, we have different features. They just
aren't equivalent.

If you really want to be helpful with this, file bug reports for _specific
things_ that are slow or use too much memory. If you just say "GNOME/E is
slow" that could be any of thousands of problems; it may be caused by
something unique to your local setup. A while back someone finally said
"the panel menu is too slow to come up" and we fixed that in a couple
days.

Havoc