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Preliminary Benchmarks: Unity vs. Gnome-Shell

Posted by timothy on from the modified-seldon-plan dept.

fatalGlory writes "Despite some initial reservations about Gnome-shell, it appears to be coming out very nicely. In some preliminary benchmarking tests I've been conducting, Ubuntu's Unity desktop on 11.04 Natty uses roughly double the memory that Gnome-shell uses."

1 of 258 comments (clear)

  1. Comparing total memory usage is stupid by fudoniten · · Score: 4, Informative

    Others have correctly pointed out that comparing memory usage on two different distros is pointless. On top of that, comparing total memory usage is stupid.

    Look, you have memory in your system to be used. If you dug into it and found out that most of that memory consisted of massive, unused libraries, duplicate code, empty datastructures, or garbage that wasn't getting cleaned up, then sure, you could give it a hard time. But if it's full of cached images and icons so that the interface can be quicker and more responsive, well, isn't that why you have all that RAM?

    A perfect program/OS would very quickly gobble up all available memory by storing and caching useful stuff...and then free it up the instant it was needed elsewhere. That turns out to be harder than it sounds, since procs generally don't know or care about totally memory usage, but still, the ideal should not be the opposite extreme.