Linux - DC times for GUI vs No X

[Chinasaur]

Has anyone done any benchmarking on Linux installs - GUI vs not running X?

Wondering (in DF for instance) how many more structures you would get per day if the GUI wasn't running.

Anyone have any answer?

[alpha]

OK, firstly I haven't done any benchmarking and I use FreeBSD, not Linux.

With that out of the way: I think your question is affected by many factors. The window manager that the user is running will obviously consume RAM and CPU, also any dockapps, any wallpaper, etc.

I use XFree 4.2.0 at 1024x768@24bpp on a K6-2 400 with 128MB RAM and a 4MB S3 Trio 3D (*cringe*). I use blackbox, with wmSolar and wmWeather and a nice colorful wallpaper (from shiftedreality.com :D). If my X session is idle, CPU usage wavers between 5 and 10 percent (according to gkrellm). This was around 1 and 2 percent on an XP 1700 last I checked. I think you should also take into account background processes and daemons when considering these numbers, though.

[TheOtherPhil]

If both boxes are doing only crunching then there should be no difference in performance assuming you have enough free RAM. When not doing anything, a task under Linux goes into the sleep state and consumes no cpu time. Obviously, if you were to use the gui then you will take a peformance hit but it should still be negligable. I don't have any solid numbers but I have a couple of identical specced machines except one is running Gentoo from the command line and the other is running SUSE8 with KDE3. When not in use, both machines put out a similar amount of work (so as not to be a noticable difference).