Looking for fast and good windows managers for my laptop

J

jailed

Hello,

I'm using FreeBSD 8.1 with WindowMaker on a 1.73 ghz 512 mb ram laptop.

Code: 
  PID USERNAME    THR PRI NICE   SIZE    RES STATE    TIME   WCPU COMMAND
81946 jailed          13  44    0   231M   116M ucond  317:04  3.47% firefox-bin
 1860 jailed           1  45    0   333M   281M select 110:19  0.00% Xorg
 1878 jailed           1  44    0  4820K   660K select  10:59  0.00% wmbsdbatt
 1864 jailed           1  44    0  9896K  3664K select   9:47  0.00% wmaker

I use gedit, urxvt, amsn, firefox and gimp on this laptop. I don't use and need any other programs.

As you see on # top, firefox eats 116 mb and Xorg eats 281 mb ram. Both of two equals 397 mb ram.

I feel so slow on this system. Even if switching windows with alt+tab, system gets very slow.

I wonder if eating 281M ram is normal for Xorg? Or is it related with WindowMaker?

What about other windows managers?

Waiting advises from you all.

Thanks.
 
Hello vermaden,

Thank you for your reply. I will install and try the programs you've suggested. Here's the result of top -b -o res

Code: 
%top -b -o res
last pid:  7999;  load averages:  0.06,  0.04,  0.06  up 12+06:34:59    14:09:47
174 processes: 2 running, 147 sleeping, 25 zombie

Mem: 247M Active, 24M Inact, 168M Wired, 11M Cache, 58M Buf, 19M Free
Swap: 958M Total, 377M Used, 582M Free, 39% Inuse


  PID USERNAME    THR PRI NICE   SIZE    RES STATE    TIME   WCPU COMMAND
 1860 jailed           1  44    0   334M   291M select 111:01  0.00% Xorg
81946 jailed          12  44    0   243M   123M ucond  320:42  1.95% firefox-bin
 6170 jailed           1  52    0   218M 38000K futex    0:05  0.00% npviewer.bin
 6190 jailed           1  44    0   218M 38000K futex    0:00  0.00% npviewer.bin
 6171 jailed           1  48    0   218M 38000K futex    0:00  0.00% npviewer.bin
86068 jailed           2  44    0 71220K 28392K select   1:55  0.00% wish8.6-threads
 6303 jailed           1  44    0 76360K 16604K select   0:14  0.00% npviewer.bin
86038 jailed           2  44    0 79372K 13864K select   4:19  0.00% wish8.6-threads
89548 jailed           1  44    0 35452K  7800K select   0:06  0.00% gedit
 1401 mysql        10  44    0 52868K  4212K sigwai   8:07  0.00% mysqld
 1864 jailed           1  44    0  9896K  4012K select   9:51  0.00% wmaker
 1699 www           1  44    0 24124K  3836K lockf    0:01  0.00% httpd
 2310 www           1  44    0 24124K  3816K lockf    0:02  0.00% httpd
 2309 www           1  44    0 24124K  3800K lockf    0:02  0.00% httpd
 2307 www           1  44    0 24124K  3784K lockf    0:02  0.00% httpd
 1703 www           1  44    0 24124K  3712K lockf    0:02  0.00% httpd
 5765 jailed           1  44    0 17036K  3632K RUN      0:00  0.00% urxvt
 2308 www           1  44    0 24124K  3448K lockf    0:02  0.00% httpd
 
jailed said:
npviewer.bin
Click to expand...

Disable Flash, enable it only if necessary, for example I use Opera without Flash, and Midori with Flash enabled just to watch/browse content that requires flash, then after I am finished I kill all npviewer.bin processes.

httpd
Click to expand...
Drop Apache and use hiawatha/nginx/cherokee/lighttpd unless You need Apache only extensions/modules.
 
Hello,

I'm already do the same thing with npviewer.bin. After I watched a flv content, I do killall npviewer.bin

I've installed Midori and geany. I've loved them so much. Midori eats half of the ram firefox do. Geany eats a half more ram than gedit but, it's so faster. Thank you for this suggestions.

I will use Firefox when I want to use Flash.

Apache and MySQL is not important for me. So I disabled them now. I've installed them to my laptop for urgent code tests. I've seperate web servers. I use the local apache server only one time a month. So disabling it is ok for me.

I've just happy for this changes.
 
wblock said:
If switching windows with alt-tab is slow, I'd suspect an xorg configuration problem first.
Click to expand...

Hello,

I don't use a custom configuration for Xorg. startx automatically creates a sample one.

I did the advises of vermaden and restarted the system and alt tab problem had gone too for now. I'm not use if that's realated with this changes or reboot. Because after this reboot, the uptime was 12 days as you see on the top results. I never shutdown the machine unless a hardware issue comes.
 
Does moving /usr partition to a nfs server make things a little faster or vice versa? Since it's a laptop, it uses 5400 rpm harddrive. I've a quad core nfs server with 7200 rpm disks. Does using nfs affect to speed?
 
Mhm - that is far from being slow computer what you have. I looked at your top output and I see IMHO a lot of swap is used. When the swapping takes place on a slow disk it is really a pain in the neck (and other places).
I guess MySQL and Apache did take a lot (compared to your amount) of the RAM.

If you run a lot of services and you hit the memory bottleneck every other application will be slow due to swapping - no matter where/what is being started (well depending on its size).

When you experience "slowness", try to run vmstat(8) to see what is system doing. Also gstat(8) can show a lot.
 
Just throwing this into the discussion: look for "my system is slow" (iirc) on some video platforms. Excellent tutorial of how to analyze and tune a FreeBSD system.
 
Blackbox or any tiling window manager as dwm. Links for veeery light browser (terminal). With links -g option you get links gui. Don't expect to see videos on youtube but you can see and preview images at least :) Well. If this is too light then midori is a good option. For Text editor, use ee or nano. They are terminals but they are very easy to use so you will have no problem :). For gui me too I give +1 for geany.
 
If Midori is 'too heavy' then You can try surf: http://freshports.org/www/surf (even Flash works under surf).

As for the PDF viewer I recommend epdfview, but mupdf is even lighter (but do not cache pages).
 
Hello,

I was already using xpdf for pdf reading. It's fast for me.

Thing gone good at the first with geany and midori but than system goes slow again.

Then I realized that harddisk gives read/write TIMEOUT error. I think there's some bad sectors on the disk.

I bought this laptop 6 years ago and I was using even KDE with all the effects on and that was fast for me.

Now I think the problem isn't related with my window manager or programs. It's hardware (harddisk) related.

Thank you guys.
 
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