Light window managers

[vg1]

There has been discussion in various posts on different window managers, and how they impact on boot speed, load etc. I prefer small & fast, to big & slow. So I have considered three basic wm's. Jwm is the default wm in puppy. icewm is very popular with many puplets, and blackbox is held to be very light but still functional and liked by many. They are similar in size, icewm is slightly bigger, but ttuuxxx has an excellent version that does not add much in weight [that's the one I used for the tests]. They are also easy to add to a basic puppy.
There are others, like lxde, xfce, kde etc but they are not so light, and require more extensive changes and additions to the default puppy.
On these three wm's the general consensus seems to be that:
blackbox/fluxbox are the lightest, but too basic for some
jwm adds more weight but also more functionality, & better looks for some
icewm adds still more weight, but still better looks & functionality.

I did some tests on Mark's [MU] puppy 410 with kernel 2.6.27. These basic & lightweight wm's are likely to be used on older pc's, where speed & therefore low load is particularly important.
It may be surprising to some that the differences in boot time & load are minimal with all three wm's themselves. It's the additional services that are loaded with each wm that make the most difference. As you will know, services like freememapplet, blinky, volume, xload run with jwm and icewm, but not with blackbox. Comparing like with like seems more fair.
Here are the figures for the three wm's, all in seconds
N='normal' load, ie the usual services for jwm and icewm [like freememapplet, blinky, volume, xload, but without glipper]. Desktop background & icons provided by rox, as default.
L='low' load, only wm's running, with all above services stopped [ie icewm only, no icetray at all]. No rox, so no desktop icons, desktop background provided by xli. jwm using quicklaunch and additionl icons on top via .jwmrc2. Icewm using quicklaunch, bb using bbdock.
Figures taken: total with top; ram, buffers, cache, load & processes with conky. So figures are with these two runnning on all three wm's.
Load is after 4' running, when all seems to be settled.

p410 k:2.6.27 [MU]
wm - bb - jwm - icewm
load - N / L- N / L - N / L
boot - 20 / 19 - 21 / 18 - 21 / 18
total - 263 / 246 - 267 / 249 - 277 / 255
ram - 27 / 23 - 29 / 24 - 35 / 26
buff - 19 / 15 - 20 / 16 - 21 / 17
cache - 209 / 201 - 211 / 202 - 214 / 205
proc - 49-1 / 47-1 - 51-1 / 48-1 - 56-1/ 46-1
load - 8-10-4 / 0-4-1 - 0-7-4 / 0-5-3 - 1-6-3 / 0-6-3

The normal load for bb seems to be unusually high, I checked it twice. The only explanation I can think of is that, because it was taken with all jwm's services running, they do not sit well with bb and use more resources than with jwm. Can anyone offer another explanation?

Boot times are practically identical [allow 1" error].
Ram & processes are lowest with bb as expected, but the difference is not so pronounced, especially in the 'low' mode.
Icewm is a bit heavier, as expected.

So for me the moral of the story is:
for high spec pc's this is of no consequence, use any wm you prefer.
For low spec pc's it makes a difference. But if you are willing to apply a few tweaks, you can still use any of these wm's without big setbacks. With stock services running, icewm is a bit heavier than the other two.

I have applied this on an old Toshiba p2 233 Mhz 32 Gb ram, and both jwm and icewm run happily in the 'low' mode. Blackbox is also fast of course, but misses some functionality that the other two have, so am not using it much.

I also use all three and two load modes on my fast pc. Not that I need to, but switching wm's and loads is fun.

If anyone is interested in more details on the 'low' mode, and a simple switcher for modes & wm's, I will follow in another post. This one is much too long as it is.

Thanks for reading through.
regards
vg

[ttuuxxx]

Wow what a great professional report,
I always had a feeling that icewm was close to JWM resources usage but a bit higher, It really doesn't make much of difference jwm or icewm which is a great thing, and blackbox is really good also other than the load amount which was strange, never really used blackbox but it looks like a no go. There are other 'box' WM also I wonder how the load works with them also. Well thanks for the run down. great job
ttuuxxx

[bugman]

nice to see this, i am always wondering if i could save by switching from jwm to *box, and am glad to see that it would be minimal savings at best

[as it is a bit of a headache]

[`f00]

<nevermind> you said it all and much better, about the only other loadfactor I could think of would be pup_event but that happens anyhow even if it's not graphically represented in bb. It's come a long way from flippin' dips

[steve_s]

Nice report, vg1. That was about as I had suspected...

It most likely then comes down to taste and what stage of the linux game one is in as to which wm to pick at this point...I love that Puppy uses jwm default that is good for those newer to linux yet not heavy like the kde's or gnomes out there..

Again, great job.

[sunburnt]

I've always liked Xfce for it's elegance & it's plentiful & neat dialogs.
The older versions had some odd behavior, but it's been awhile...
Has anyone used the newer version of Xfce? How does it compare?

[amigo]

I suspect that blackbox needs more memory because it is written in C++. if you are gonna go that way, fluxbox is probably a better alternative as it is more complete.
I have been using wmaker nearly exclusively for years now -it starts much faster than fluxbox and has memory usage nearly the same. I find it really elegant and it combines well with the wdm display manager for GUI logins. It also comes with a nice GUI configuration app and there is still another available. I also use ROX-Filer for the pinboard and a panel (taskbar) to dill out the desktop. I use wmaker without DOCK or Clip so I have a clean desktop for ROX to work with. But I use several of the more useful DockApps along with a bunch of AppDirs.
XFCE is not really light at all -it is much smaller than KDE or GNOME, but it is quite slow to start -it does look very nice though and has more associated desktop tools to go with it than anything else besides KDE or GNOME.

[Ralph]

Howdy,
I use xubuntu on one machine and xfce works fine. I like it best of the light window managers I have tried. Openbox is growing on me, though. JWM is quite usable and I have not looked into the difference in resource usage between it and XFCE. I don't know how long ago you tried XFCE. I tried it a few years back and was not impressed. But, it steadily improved. I can't tell you any amazing features. It just works well.

[playdayz]

I enjoyed your comparison of the wm's vg1. I agree with your approach: if the question is performance we should look at the numbers. I also agree with your finding that it is the services that make the most difference--not the wm's themselves. The advantage of blackbox as I run it is that most of the services are disabled. When I was playing around I did some simpler numbers that can be seen in the graphics at
http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=34474
Basically blackbox is running fewer tasks (23-12) and consequently uses less cpu (5.7% to .7%) and less memory (25 to 18 MB). If blackbox is more responsive (which is my goal) I think it is because it is not sharing the cpu as much as the others. So keep it up man; as Edwards Demming demonstrated, if you want quality then you have to watch the numbers.