Re: XFIXES extension proposal

Around 0 o'clock on Dec 1, Boris wrote:

> What XFree *really* needs is much more data compression when sending data
> to a remote display

I'm doing some packet level analysis of this problem; at ethernet speeds, 
most X applications spend a lot more time waiting for round trips than 
they do waiting for space on the wire to transmit more packets.

The only time this isn't true is during image transport, so some kind of 
image compression is clearly indicated.

The kind of image compression (essentially PNG vs JPEG), it's interactions 
with Render and shared memory are still unresolved issues my view.

> The X protocol uses alot of Bandwidth when dealing with *alot* of clients.

That's not always true; applications sending a lot of images do consume 
some transient bandwidth, but many applications can be easily run with 
128Kb or less of bandwidth.  X applications are often very dependent on 
network latency for reasonable performance though, much of that dependence 
can be attributed to "sloppy" code in toolkits which don't always 
carefully avoid every round trip possible.

Keith Packard        XFree86 Core Team        HP Cambridge Research Lab