In the general discussion about “lightweight” desktop environments I have read a few times that one should disable Compositing in KWin. That’s done in Kubuntu’s low-fat settings package and also something Jos talked about in the context of Klyde.

I have never seen an explanation on why Compositing should matter at all. It mostly boils down to “OpenGL is evil” and “I don’t want 3D”. So let’s leave the “educated guesses” behind us and have a proper look to the question whether Compositing matters for “lightweight”. (Remember: lightweight is a buzz-word without any meaning.)

Let’s start from one of the “lightweight” aspects: Memory. For this it’s important to know that KWin is a Window Manager and Compositor. You cannot just have the Window Manager – even if compositing is disabled. It’s not like xcompmgr which runs in another process. For the binary that gets loaded into memory it doesn’t matter whether compositing is enabled or not. The pure binary containing both window manager and compositor has a size of 1.3 M (on Debian testing, that should be KDE SC 4.8). But when you enable compositing an additional library gets loaded containing the Effects. They are all in one library to not have to open 40 different files. (Again on Debian testing) This library has a size of 783 K. The effects do not link any library which is not already linked by KWin core, so that’s what we are talking about from additional memory costs when using any desktop effect from binary size: 783 K!

Obviously the binary mapped into memory is just one aspect. There are also additional data structures which need to be created on the heap. I have no idea how much is really needed and cannot properly look at my system because I have a KWin with debugging symbols loaded. What’s important to know is that only Effects one uses will get loaded and use memory for their data structures. Also the Effects do not load everything they need but wait till they get activated. E.g. the cube effect will only load a background texture if the cube gets activated. But of course effects do not have anything to do with just using compositing. If you don’t want an effect, just disable it.

The biggest cost from compositing in the memory perspective is probably using the XComposite extension which redirects the rendering into an X pixmap. That’s something which will go away once we are on Wayland as application and compositor share the buffer the application is rendering to.

But even so the usage of the additional memory is not just something which is thrown out. It’s just another case of the time-memory tradeoff. Unrelated windows do not need to repaint if a window get’s unmapped, moved or resized. Just look at this comment from the non-composited switching of virtual desktops:

During virt. desktop switching, desktop areas covered by windows that are going to be hidden are first obscured by new windows with no background ( i.e. transparent ) placed right below the windows. These invisible windows are removed after the switch is complete. Reduces desktop ( wallpaper ) repaints during desktop switching

Without compositing we move the time-memory tradeoff towards using more CPU (create those windows) to prevent even more CPU usage. With compositing we don’t have to do anything of it. So disabling compositing is obviously not the silver bullet for being “lightweight”. It just means moving the time-memory tradeoff slider towards CPU.

What remains is the OpenGL question. I know that many people think it’s about having a “3D desktop”. But the desktop I’m using is quite 2D-ish. There are people saying that 2D is just a special case of 3D. Looking at OpenGL that is certainly the case. As long as you don’t use any effect which needs the “3D aspect” of OpenGL, KWin just does 2D with OpenGL. Using OpenGL means to make use of hardware which is designed to do these operations instead of doing it on the CPU which is not designed for it. But what if one doesn’t have the hardware for it? A valid question, but just not in the context of KWin. If your system only provides software rendering KWin automatically falls back to XRender based compositing.

The last aspect to mention in the context of OpenGL is texture from pixmap. I don’t know how it’s implemented in the drivers so I don’t know whether that needs additional memory or not. But if you are concerned about it: XRender does not need a texture from pixmap.

So as you can see compositing comes with a little bit more memory usage but reduces CPU usage. It’s nothing I could say which one is generally better, but less CPU usage means a sleeping CPU. Granted some effects do animations – that also requires CPU usage. If you are concerned about that it’s better to disable the effects or set the global animation speed to instant than to just disable compositing completely.

And if you try to be “lightweight” and play with the compositing settings: one unrelated change can ruin all your benefit. Just imagine you would disable compositing because you want to be “lightweight” and then you enable a window decoration which uses QML (that is interpreted code) and does animations?