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Window Managers 64-bit Memory Usage
How much memory does your window manager use? You can check yourself with
the command ps -ao comm,size,rss,vsize
. I have tried to note
where the window manager has other applications it runs. Memory management
in Linux is quite complex, and I don't feel competent to explain the exact
nature of "size," "rss," and "vsize." Suffice to say that some of them
include not only all the memory used by the app, but also memory used by
all libraries used by the app - which means that if the WM has subordinate
apps, a library that's loaded once may be counted several times. Read up
on it. You can also check how many libraries your WM uses with ldd
$WMexecutable
. Sizes listed are in KiB.
Click on the column header to sort the table by the data in that column.
Window Manager | Version | Executable(s) | size 64-bit |
rss 64-bit |
vsize 64-bit |
Number of Libraries |
Notes |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
9wm | 1.2-9 | 9wm | 404 | 1324 | 24752 | 10 | |
aewm | 1.3.12-2 | aewm | 656 | 3436 | 41224 | 17 | |
aewm++ | 1.1.2-4.1 | aewm++ | 484 | 1972 | 32592 | 13 | |
AfterStep | 2.2.9-4 | afterstep | 12996 | 18276 | 127240 | 48 | Starts several helper apps of a similar size. |
ahwm | 0.90-1 | ahwm | 404 | 1520 | 24860 | 10 | |
Awesome | 2.3.2 | awesome | 6852 | 13292 | 140284 | 34 | |
Awesome | 3.4-1 | awesome | 4180 | 9392 | 167668 | 53 | |
Blackbox | 0.70.1-2.2 | blackbox | 1072 | 5056 | 54640 | 21 | Blackbox makes little sense without bbkeys for keybindings: it has similar memory usage measures. |
CTWM | 3.7-3 | ctwm | 864 | 2944 | 44400 | 17 | |
dwm | 4.7-3 | dwm | 408 | 1572 | 23924 | 9 | |
Evil WM | 1.0.0-1 | evilwm | 408 | 1392 | 26824 | 12 | |
Fluxbox | 1.0.0+deb1-7 | fluxbox | 1672 | 6124 | 60224 | 24 | |
Fluxbox | 1.0.0+deb1-8 | fluxbox | 1680 | 6100 | 66384 | 26 | |
flwm | 1.02+cvs20080422-2 | flwm | 740 | 4384 | 52576 | 22 | |
FVWM 2 | 2.5.28.ds-1 | fvwm | 760 | 4664 | 111808 | 50 | |
Icewm | 1.2.35-1 | icewm | 1504 | 5576 | 70152 | 28 | |
Ion 2 | 20040729-3 | ion2 | 1100 | 2852 | 41876 | 15 | |
Ion 3 | 20080411-1 | ion3 | 2096 | 4204 | 53804 | 16 | |
JWM | 2.0.1-1.1 | jwm | 752 | 3920 | 49124 | 21 | |
LarsWM | 7.5.3-6 | larswm | 420 | 1384 | 24824 | 10 | |
LWM | 1.2.1-1.1 | lwm | 436 | 1536 | 30272 | 12 | |
Matchbox | 1.2-2 | matchbox-window-manager | 5868 | 11380 | 97404 | 33 | A Matchbox session runs not only "matchbox-window-manager" (numbers shown here), but also matchbox-panel (8796 14568 93872), mb-applet-menu-launcher (5748 11236 95312), mb-applet-clock (6408 11944 96128), and the largest, matchbox-desktop (9392 18288 141176). Matchbox is intended for low resource environments. What am I missing? Of course I doubt anyone would ever run it on amd64 ... |
Metacity | 2.28.0-1 | metacity | 1732 | 10500 | 165664 | 66 | Metacity is helpless without a pager and menu system, which must be run as separate processes (usually supplied by GNOME). |
OpenBox | 3.4.7.2-2 | openbox | 5380 | 10492 | 94904 | 34 | |
PekWM | 0.1.11 | pekwm | 4348 | 8088 | 67944 | 27 | Debian testing package. |
PWM2 (Ion2) | 20040729-3 | pwm2 | 960 | 2656 | 40640 | 15 | |
qlwm | 4.3 | qlwm | 3220 | 12876 | 119544 | 33 | |
qvwm | 1.1.12-4 | qvwm | 796 | 3032 | 58628 | 24 | |
RatPoison | 1.4.3-1 | ratpoison | 424 | 1720 | 34628 | 14 | |
StumpWM | 1:20070908-1 | stumpwm/sbcl | 8389772 | 56884 | 8440756 | 6 | Requires a lisp environment, in this case sbcl: numbers reported are for that. May not be entirely correct: it locked on startup. Note that with clisp rather than sbcl the 32-bit version was more than an order of magnitude smaller. |
TinyWM | 1.3-4 | tinywm | 272 | 952 | 17256 | 9 | |
twm | 1:1.0.4-2 | twm | 1392 | 2948 | 35924 | 14 | |
VTWM | 5.4.7-2.2 | vtwm | 1184 | 2880 | 42420 | 16 | |
w9wm | 0.4.2-5 | w9wm | 428 | 1536 | 33176 | 10 | |
WindowMaker | 0.92.0-8.1 | wmaker/WindowMaker | 2552 | 6440 | 60056 | 24 | Runs two copies, the other somewhat smaller. |
wm2 | 4-10 | wm2 | 484 | 1836 | 32596 | 13 | |
WindowLab | 1.34-1 | windowlab | 576 | 3352 | 39332 | 17 | |
wmii | 3.6+debian-4 | wmii | 556 | 2036 | 32824 | 9 | |
wmx | 6pl1 | wmx | 412 | 1916 | 4224 | 14 | v6 2001. |
wmx | 7 | wmx | 860 | 3768 | 55120 | 23 | v7 2009. Memory usage has gone up ... |
wmx | 8 | wmx | 1340 | 4152 | 65216 | 25 | v8 2015. |
xterm | 235-1 | xterm | 2480 | 4016 | 57544 | 24 | xterm can act as a WM (although not very well). But it's mostly here for comparison. |
XMonad | 0.8-1 | xmonad | 1296 | 2784 | 6052 | 15 | Requires Haskell, which is huge and annoying, but this is impressively small. |