This was actually supposed to be a follow-up to my tests of startup performance of various desktop environments, primarily KDE of course :). In fact I even did most of the benchmarks some time after the startup ones, but, alas, I'm much better at writing things that computers are supposed to read than at writing things that people will read :-/ (some volunteer to write good user documentation for KWin's window specific settings, BTW ;) ?) I even meant to make a somewhat more extensive analysis of the numbers, but having never found time to write that, I decided I should publish at least a shorter variant with all the numbers and some conclusions. You can do your own analyses of the numbers if you will.
These memory benchmarks are meant to measure various cases of desktop configuration and compare KDE to some other desktop environments. Specifically, I compared against Xfce 4.2.2 (as shipped with SUSE Linux 10.0) as the so-called lightweight desktop, WindowMaker 0.92.0 as a plain window manager and GNOME. GNOME, built using GARNOME, was originally version 2.12.2, later redoing it with 2.14.0 (without actually measuring noticeable difference in these specific cases, despite 2.14 release notes claiming performance improvements). As I no longer have the same setup I cannot redo it with the very recent 2.16 unfortunately. Simply consider this to be a bit old. The others are for comparison anyway :). KDE itself was KDE 3.5.2 with my performance patches, all of which are already upstream by now.
The tool used to measure memory usage was Exmap - the only tool for measuring memory usage that I've ever found to be actually useful (I think I've already blogged about it ;) ). Its so-called effective memory usage numbers try to account for things like dividing shared libraries among all the processes using them, unlike tools like top that just report the numbers they find in /proc and nobody really knows how to interpret them. In other words, if you use things like top or free for precise measuring of memory usage, you're crazy. Nevertheless, for the crazy ones, I used also free alongside with Exmap, just for the fun of it, numbers from free will follow in parentheses. They should not be considered to be useful though.
