Re: Is Sawfish lightweighted?

[Pat Regan <thehead patshead com>]

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On 03/22/2010 11:43 PM, Teika Kazura wrote:
> Do you think Sawfish is lightweighted? In my opinion, not so
> much. Openbox for example in my opinion can be deemed
> lightweighted. Do you know any "heavy" WMs? (On PC, / tablet ...)

I would be willing to say that Sawfish is light weight.  The slowest
machines I've run Sawfish on daily were an Intel 700mhz laptop with,
IIRC, 192 meg of ram and a Transmeta Crusoe with ~320 meg of usable ram.

I doubt Sawfish is significantly heavier now than it was back then.

> It's because Sawfish introduction phrases say "Sawfish is
> lightweighted", but I'd like to be honest and precise.

Sawfish is light weight, but it is also probably packed with more
features than any other window manager.

> I tried Openbox the other day, and even though I expected so, I was a
> bit shocked that it started very fast. Memory usage doesn't seem to
> vary much; 9M by sawfish vs 8M by openbox, comparing "RES" field in
> htop.

Openbox is very bare bones.  Sawfish is trading 1M of memory (and
probably a small amount of CPU) for boatload of configure ability.

I just peaked at a nearby Ubuntu 8.04 LTS desktop that I have ssh access
to.  One might argue that the RSS of 5M for Metacity makes it lighter
than Openbox and Sawfish :)

> # Openbox is barely customizable contrary to their claim, viewed from
> # "the" Sawfish standard. Yet we can learn from it.

The memory and CPU consumption of Sawfish has never been a problem.  It
makes a barely noticeable impact even on hardware that is currently
considered ancient by most.  I'd say we're already optimized more than
enough and that time is better spent on new features and improvements
than trying to make Sawfish more efficient.

The old "Eight Megs And Constantly Swapping" jab at Emacs has seemed
pretty silly for quite a few years already, right?  :)

Pat
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