Desktop manager memory footprint

KDE and Gnome are often concidered as too big in memory for old (less than 512MB of RAM) computers. I checked to other desktop manager to find something smaller. Here are the 3 compared configuration:

KDE 3.5.9

• Login manager: kdm
• Session manager: startkde
• Window manager: kwin
• Terminal: konsole
• Other: kweather applet, knetstat applet,  system monitor kicker applet.

XFCE 4.4.2

• Login manager: slim
• Session manager: xfce4-session
• Window manager: xfwm4
• Terminal: xfce4-terminal
• Other: I don’t know, I just did apt-get install xfce4

LXDE 0.3.2.1

• Login manager: slim
• Session manager: startlxde
• Window manager: openbox
• Terminal: lxterminal
• Other: Standard Debian LXDE (xscreensaver, lxpanel …)

How I mesured memory:

The best way to mesure memory on Linux is to use exmap. Unfortunnatly it’s broken on Linux 2.6.26. So here is the method I used:

• Reboot and login
• start a terminal
• cat /proc/meminfo
• Result = <MemTotal> - <MemFree> - <Buffers> - <Cached>

I did the tests with Debian Sid x86 packages (updated on 2008-12-21). Unfortunnatly, my test description is probably not precise enough, so I could compare with test made with different PCs and configuration.

Results

• KDE: 72MB
• XFCE: 71MB
• LXDE: 62MB