Testing Methods

I currently use RedHat 9.0 on most of my systems. Three systems were used for most of the testing, my desktop (an Athlon 2700+ with 512 meg of RAM), my laptop (a 233 MHz Pentium with 64 meg of RAM), and my work desktop (a 933 MHz Pentium with 256 meg of RAM). I used RPM packages whenever possible. The RPMs came from all over: some came with RedHat, some were from FreshRPMs or Fedora, some were compiled by the WM creator, and some were compiled by unknown third parties, so it's possible I'm using a less than optimal binary or missing interesting features. Nevertheless, I think these packages should give a good overview of the capabilities of the window managers. When I couldn't find a binary RPM, I compiled the package myself.

I'm not an expert on Linux memory management. Most processes in Linux seem to be opportunistic about their use of memory: if there's more real memory available, the process will expand to fill it (presumably caching less-used materials). This makes it hard to say how much memory any given process actually uses. I use "top" to see how much memory processes use, and it provides three different measures: "SIZE," "RSS," and "SHARE." I read the man page but still didn't fully understand which to use. I'm guessing that "RSS" is the best indicator of use of real memory, but I'd like to emphasize that that's definitely a guess. To restrain the opportunistic absorption of memory, I've tried to take most measures of memory use on the laptop, which has limited memory (64Mb).