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I’ve had a need and philosophy for using “light” programs, but how can one objectively determine speed or memory use? Using top and subjective opinion isn’t exact enough.

What’s the best way?

• Not in a virtual machine, that’s for sure!
• Reboot
• Same system workload (same startup conditions)

• Judge memory, virtual memory, cpu usage?

When judging complex programs like a window manager, I need to include:

• All libraries

• All required tools / accessories (e.g. a clock)

  • And their libraries!
  • Also note configuration or other nuisances for any such tools.

Programs ∞

Using what tools?

• top / htop
• Ganglia
• mem.py
• Sloth

• … others? (to research)

\ps  -ao  comm,size,rss,vsize
\ldd  /path/to/executable | \wc  --lines

Memory usage may vary wildly on i386 versus amd64, etc.

• sloth

  • I might be able to use it to slow things down and make a subjective speed test.

Notes on testing terminals ∞

(Terminals)

• “skip mode” speeds things up. rxvt (or urxvt) with -ss -j

• “Comprehensive” linux terminal performance comparison

  • Mostly bogus, he’s just streaming a text file. No proper memory usage comparison either.

• Terminal Memory Usage

  • Used to exist at but the archive is broken.