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Litestep uses less memory? Thread last updated on 2003-02-13 15:08:15

Posted by member 4148 on 2003-02-11 11:13:42

I recently switched to litestep (like it alot), but I was wondering (I couldn't find anything about it on this forum): Is litestep a faster shell than the explorer shell? Or do you pay a price for it's beauty in terms of memory usage etc.? I think this also depends on the theme you are running off course, but just want to know a general opinion about it.

Thanks for any answers,

Rem

Posted by member 1 on 2003-02-11 11:18:53 link

Memory usage in LiteStep depends on what modules you are running and the amount of graphics you need. Some modules have been known to be written poorly and caused adverse effects down the road where as running a small theme does make windows a hell of a lot faster and more reliable. Once again...YOU are in control.

Posted by member 4148 on 2003-02-11 11:21:32 link

Any way to see if it is written poorly in the code? Or is it just to check the memory usage a (e.g. after a clean restart) and compare it? Anyway, I'm using the elegance 16 theme right now, which feels a lot faster than the sputnik theme I used before :).

Posted by member 5669 on 2003-02-11 15:36:18 link

in a well configured theme, litestep can use anywhere from 4 to 10 megs of ram whereas explorer uses at least 15 without all the add-ons you'll need to make it pretty (once you add those, you're at like 20 megs).

Posted by member 3116 on 2003-02-11 20:08:02 link

you could always d/l a mem leak tracker from shellfront.org, it'll dump your memory usage to a log file.

Posted by member 4148 on 2003-02-12 03:51:05 link

Thanks for your replies, I'll try that.

Rem

Posted by member 6817 on 2003-02-12 11:55:35 link

i have a memory scrubber in the background that constantly shecks my usage, plus if you're running win2k/XP, you can bring up the Task Manager and look at your current memory usage by process. don't know if that helps answer your question...

Posted by member 4148 on 2003-02-13 03:42:18 link

Yeah, I run XP en used the task manager also to check memory usage between the various Litestep themes and the Explorer shell. I could have done it wrong, but I thought that Litestep uses a little bit more memory in most cases (tried with Elegance, Lunar_Base, Simple, Simplicity and Amiga HLE), although it boots faster and has less threads going on (after a clean restart).

Rem

Posted by member 4132 on 2003-02-13 04:52:57 link

Before installing LiteStep I had Win98SE, tuned to have 98% of the system resources free on startup. Then I installed LiteStep, and it didn't matter. So LiteStep has to equally good, or does that resource indicator really measures the status of your swapfile, I think I heard that somewhere to?

Posted by member 534 on 2003-02-13 10:36:35 link

Litestep reports higher memory usage under XP due to the need to load COM libraries for the system tray. That's true under 0.24.7 (currently) as well and is required to support the new Microsoft system tray icons (DUN, etc.) in 2000 and XP.

However, various applications use these libraries and there is a degree of uncertainty as to how the task manager reports memory usage for programs using shared libraries (does it report the x MB used by the library for each program using it, or just once & even that can be confused further by reporting usage, but not actually using that memory, etc.) Under 2000, Litestep reports roughly a third of the memory usage that it does under XP for exactly the same configuration. However, Explorer shows the same trend. Memory is cheap and I don't believe the numbers :)

Posted by member 4148 on 2003-02-13 15:08:15 link

Allright then, I was anyhow meaning to install windows 2000 instead of windows XP, for memory reasons. The look is cool anyway with Litestep:)! Thanks for all the information!

Rem