Re: Snappy GUI response

On Thu, Jul 03, 2003 at 12:52:52PM -0700, Mark Vojkovich wrote:
>    This is because people writing X applications (and particularly 
> X toolkits) have little understanding of graphics performance issues
> in the X-Window system.  They say they do, but the results (slower
> and slower toolkits every year) imply that they don't.  Most of
> these problems lie in the continued failure of toolkits to reduce
> the round trip communication between the client and the server.

Is there any X-benchmark which shows that the performance of an
application under X can come close to the performance of an
application under Windows when written "correctly"? 

IMO, a bigger contributing factor is that the X design does not have
application performance as its number one objective, and the resulting
compromises are hard to make. X was designed when networked terminals
(Xterms) hooked up to central servers (mainframes) was an important
configuration. It's hard to let go of those roots.

As an observer, it looks to me like the X priorities are:

1) maintain X network-protocol compatibility
2) maintain xlib library compatibility
3) improve performance through optional extensions (dga,etc)
4) avoid letting the X-server get huge through big changes to 
   the display model

It would take a monumental shift in the mindset of the entire concept
of what X is to change this. Everyone working on X everywhere would
have to agree that being high performance is the most important goal,
and that anything and everything would be changed which got in the
way. 

Keep in mind that I'm not saying the network protocol has to go, I'm
just saying that nobody has set their heights high-enough yet to find
out. Make X-windows beat the performance of Windows on one set of
identical hardware and we'll be getting somewhere. Can that happen
with the X-protocol? I don't know the answer to that, but I have not
seen it yet. [[ FYI: M$ reluctantly rolled video drivers into their
'microkernel' in NT 4.0 because their hard requirement was making NT
4.0 rival Win98 in winbench, and everything else was secondary. ]]

If you want to improve the performance of X, port (or replicate)
winbench, and drop priority #1 above. Get ready for a rude awakening
when you see the first scores, and take as your ultimate goal to have
this winbench port rival the performance of Windows winbench. I bet if
you talked to the right people at VeriTest/PC Magazine they would let
you help them port the original code.

  http://www.veritest.com/benchmarks/winbench/winbench.asp

They already started some linux benchmarking:

  http://www.veritest.com/bi/cont1999/1999print/intunesb.asp?visitor=X
  http://www.veritest.com/bi/cont2000/2000print/linuxenv.asp?visitor=X

-- 
David Jeske (N9LCA) + http://www.chat.net/~jeske/ + [email protected]