This is part of The Pile, a partial archive of some open source mailing lists and newsgroups.
Subject: Re: xwindows slow in general or...? From: "Hossein S. Zadeh" <hossein@hossein.bf.rmit.edu.au> Date: Wed, 24 May 2000 18:57:07 +1000 (EST) On Wed, 24 May 2000, Thomas Ribbrock wrote: > On Tue, May 23, 2000 at 07:28:15PM -0700, Stephen King wrote: > > Is it just my installations or it is a fact that xwindows, and say KDE or > > Gnome, are slower than any win95/98/NT/2000 installation on the same > > machine? > [...] <flame armor> Let me set the record straight: X IS slower than windows on the same hardware. </flame armor> This is exactly because of the same reason NT is slower than 95/98. NT packs in much more features/functionality than 95/98; and ofcourse it runs slower. X packs in much more features/functionality than even NT. In addition, X has poor 3D hardware acceleration support (at best of times). These all make X run slower than either of 95/98/NT on the same platform. All that said, if you give X enough RAM (at least 64M, preferably more), then the speed difference CAN become negligible. As a rule of thumb, run 'top', press 'm', and note 'SIZE' of X. You need at least that much RAM plus, say, 32MB (to prevent thrashing). As usual YMMV. ===