Is Gnome 3 lighter than Gnome 2?

Solution 1:

First problem to do this comparison: how to decrease the influence of User Interface at the results?

My first solution was to use Lubuntu as both 11.04 and 11.10 has the same LXDE environment (see below the Old). But latter I thought what now sounds obvious: how can someone compare Gnome versions not using Gnome? o_O The comparison had to be done otherwise. So it was. ;-)

I created a virtual machine with VirtualBox then installed 11.04 and Oneiric Ocelot one alongside the other. After that the guest addons were installed and the systems rebooted.

I opened a terminal and type uname -a to see some information:

11.04

Oneiric Ocelot

Then I use the command top to see the running processes and memory usage:

11.04

Oneiric Ocelot

The graphical monitor:

11.04

Oneiric Ocelot

At last I opened in this sequence: Firefox, Libreoffice, Banshee.

11.04

Oneiric Ocelot

Conclusions

With top we can see that in both the 4 most resource intensive processes are in this order:

compiz > Xorg > gnome-terminal > top

The System Monitor shows that
11.04 was using 271.9 MiB of RAM and ~20% of the CPU
while
Oneiric was using 345.1 MiB of RAM and ~20% of the CPU.

After opening some programs these values come closed:
11.04 was using 482.6 MiB of RAM and ~20% of the CPU
while
Oneiric was using 481.1 MiB of RAM and ~20% of the CPU. The swap partition has been used with 19.0 MiB

I think that maybe Oneiric is preloading some libraries so apps can load faster. This would explain why 11.04 has initially less RAM usage but after opening some programs the RAM usage comes virtually equal.

So while some could argue if it is or it isn't fair to compare an alpha to a premium software, these numbers shows just a little change.

Enjoy ;-)

Old
Trying to eliminate others variables to isolate Gnome-3 vs Gnome-2 comparison I've downloaded Lubuntu 11.04 and Lubuntu 11.10 alpha-3. (Here comes another problem: is it fair to compare an alpha software with a premium software? Later I will come back to this point.)

I created a virtual machine with VirtualBox then run both Operating Systems with virtual Live CD.

Then I opened a terminal and type uname -a to see some information:

11.04

Oneiric Ocelot

Then I use the command top to see the running processes and memory usage:

11.04

Oneiric Ocelot

The graphical monitor:

11.04

Oneiric Ocelot

At last I opened in this sequence: Chromium, Archive Manager, Abiword, Gnome MPlayer.

11.04

Oneiric Ocelot

So we can see that Oneiric with LXDE is using less cpu and less memory even at an alpha version. I'm happily surprised here. But after all things are as they should be: evolving for the better.

Hopefully this can ease the intuitive belief that Gnome is getting heavier. (Became heavier is the natural evolution of others systems, not here ;-) )