Re: Snappy GUI response

On Thu, 2003-07-03 at 20:49, Alan Cox wrote:
> > IMO, a bigger contributing factor is that the X design does not have
> > application performance as its number one objective, and the resulting
> 
> Wrong. When X was designed every clock counted. 8Mhz was "elite cool
> workstation to fight over"

Yeah, this is the common misconception with X.

XFree might not be the most efficient implementation of the X protocol,
but the bottlenecks are not really within X itself.  It's a combination
of application design and the kernel involved.

When I switched from a heavily patched 2.4 Linux kernel to the 2.5.6x-mm
Linux kernels, the difference was amazing.  I also hear that X on
FreeBSD is incredibly snappy too.

I think the 2.6 Linux kernel will do a lot for the image of XFree in
that it will expose the original problem was not XFree or X, but that
the design of the Linux 2.4 kernel was not aligned with the type of
process management that would improve X performance.

Of course, accelerated X drivers for your hardware can be pretty handy
as well, but it didn't make as much of a noticeable difference to 2D
performance as switching to Andrew Morton's variant of the development
Linux kernel.

- Charlie

-- 
Charles Goodwin <[email protected]>
XWT Foundation - www.xwt.org