[Thunar-workers] [DokuWiki] page added: memory_usage

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Date        : 2005/11/14 16:18
Browser     : Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; FreeBSD i386; en-US; rv:1.7.10) Gecko/20050720 Firefox/1.0.6
IP-Address  : 80.131.215.68
Hostname    : p5083D744.dip.t-dialin.net
Old Revision: none
New Revision: http://thunar.xfce.org/wiki/memory_usage
Edit Summary: created
User        : benny

===== Memory Usage =====

Several people wanted to see numbers about Thunar's memory usage in comparison to other popular file managers for the Unix/Linux desktop. So, here are some numbers for Thunar in comparison to Nautilus, ROX, Konqueror and Xffm.


==== Test setup ====

My spare time is limited, and so I won't come up with a 100% exact test setup here (in fact, there's a good chance that such a setup does not exist at all, but I'm not going into the details of measurement engineering here). What we are primary interested in is the amount of **unshared memory** required by each file manager while displaying a certain folder. That is, memory allocated solely to the file manager, which cannot be shared with other processes. To make life easier, we will ignore things like per-process kernel structures, etc., and concentrate on the stack and data (heap, bss, ...) sizes of the process. The measurement will be performed on a FreeBSD 5.4/i386 system, which offers the advantage that, due to the nature of the memory allocator in libc, the kernel's knowledge of allocated data memory pages is pretty close to the real data memory usage.

Our test setup includes the following software components (right off the ports tree):

  * Gtk+ 2.6.10
  * GLib 2.6.6
  * Nautilus 2.10.1
  * ROX 2.2.0
  * kdelibs 3.4.0
  * kdebase 3.4.0

And in addition:

  * Xffm 4.2.3 (somehow I couldn't get the 4.3.x thing to work properly here)
  * Thunar 0.1.3svn-r18844


==== Test case ====

The test case is pretty simple: Open a directory with 1261 files and 107 subdirectories, scroll through the whole view and measure the memory usage. The scroll-step is for sportsmanship, as Thunar loads icons only on-demand, while the other file managers load icons instantly when loading the directory.


==== Test results ====

The values shown below are given in KiloBytes (KB). In case of Konqueror and Nautilus, only the size of the file manager process was measured, leaving out the memory usage of the helper processes.

^ File manager ^ Virtual size ^ Stack size ^ Data size ^ Executable/Library size ^
| Xffm         |        16568 |        128 |      4188 |                   12248 |
| Konqueror    |        34660 |        128 |      7884 |                   26644 |
| ROX          |        20980 |        128 |      5544 |                   15304 |
| Nautilus     |        27812 |        128 |      7780 |                   19900 |
| Thunar       |        17172 |        128 |      2900 |                   14140 |

As said earlier, the **Executable/Library size** is not what we are interested in, as a large amount of this memory is shared between all desktop processes (e.g. X libs, Glib, Pango, Gtk+, and the kdelibs in case of Konqueror). The interesting number is the **Data size** as this is memory used by the file manager process only (well, with a few exceptions, which aren't important in the case of a file manager), and thereby gives a good idea of the //overhead// caused by the file manager.

The numbers for Konqueror and Nautilus aren't really surprising, and aren't that worse, because you need to take into account that both Nautilus and Konqueror can do more than the other three file managers, no matter if you like it or not.

I'll leave it up to the reader to interpret these numbers. But remember that those are by no means 100% exact. It's just a rough measurement, used to give an overview about the approx. memory usage of Thunar compared to other popular file managers.



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