Re: gui 'slow' with remote X ?

[Riccardo Mottola]

Hi,

On 2008-11-24 08:58:17 +0100 Philippe Roussel <p.o.roussel@free.fr> 
wrote:

> > Nice to see there is another user. FOr me, besides, GTK2 is slow too.
> > Cairo and Art are going to be slow. No work around. Try the faithful 
> > xlib 
> > backend, which I use regularly. It will be faster, since instead of 
> > shuffling bitmaps, it lets the server do the work, like font drawing.
>
> Well, I just make a quick test and xlib backend is really slow two,
> maybe even slower than art, to display any widget. Are you using X 
> over
> ssh or just exporting your display ? Not that it should change 
> anything
> but...
>
> For me, gtk2 applications are quite usable.

I don't know what to tell you: for me it is very fine. I use regularly 
X11 export to access my various machines. Except for my laptop I do 
not use art but xlib. I think the speed is quite good, I can use 
GNUMail without problems. ProjectCenter, Ink... everything reasonably 
fine. Just applications that scroll are a pit a pain (like using 
PRICE).
I also use it over 10Mbit ethernet without significant decrease. 
Wireless will be worse due to the latency.

I never liked GTK2, one of the reasons being its slow display export 
(and also buggyness when it comes to endianness and different displays 
during export).

I usually export by setting the display, thus I have different font 
caches and it is a tad faster, but export over SSH is pretty similar 
in terms of speed.

I can even use GWorkspace, but you need to disable the desktop and the 
Tabbed Shelf.



> > One thing will be awful though: scrolling. I think GNUstep is quite 
> > inefficient there, it makes a LOT of X11 calls, art is less affected 
> > when 
> > it uses xshm. On a slower machine you will see that X11 can 
> > sometimeseat up 
> > to 50% of your CPU for some operations..

That could be indeed. When running on a 120Mhz PPC, I observed once 
that Xfree was taking up to 60% of the cpu compared to the app 
itself... everything for a quite bad performance.

Riccardo