About our effort at NoMachine

  Gian Filippo Pinzari [email protected] wrote on [email protected]

> Wed, 26 Mar 2003 23:55:33 +0100
> 
> Currently the most popular desktop environments issue some
> -thousands- of InternAtom and GetProperty requests. InternAtom
> are already optimized in Xlib, and would probably be simple to
> implement the same strategy for GetProperty. IMHO, anyway,
> clients should use PropertyNotify events when needed instead
> of asking questions all the time to the poor X server. But maybe
> it's just because I miss something...
> 
> The interface for async replies in Xlib is difficult to use and,
> so, nobody is using it. I suggest a simple mechanism to handle
> reply notifications as events. We did this in NX and it works very
> well. In practice you get a event when a reply is ready (i.e. has
> been received from remote side) then client can call a function
> to get the reply and its data. This is simple to handle for most
> existing clients as it is trivial to plug in the usual event loop. This
> mechanism was used for GetImage requests, then we got rid
> of it completely when we switched to a fb at X client (agent)
> side.
> 

I don't really understand all these technical arguments. But I can tell
you my user experience with your technology improvements for remote X
sessions, and I like it  ;-)    :

* I am testdriving NX since a few days. And this is by *far* the fastest
   "remote destop-ing" system I have ever seen.

* The performance across an internet link is really astonishing. It is
   better than what I have even on my LAN (or via a crosslink cable between
   desktop and laptop) using KDE-3.1's krdc/krfb!

* I was able to connect to an NX controlled X session on a remote RedHat
   system. From inside that session I connected via RDP to a another box,
   running MS Win XP (I understand this is done via RDP, yes?) and played
   "Pinball". With a bad connection I wouldn't have scored   631750  points
   at first attempt, would I?

Playing pinball on a remote desktop is probably not easy to get right,
because it is more like watching a movie than doing some "work" on
the desktop.

What is the relative improvement for the RDP you have accomplished?
Is there any at all? Or is it more or less a 1:1 transfer of those
contents (tunneled through the NX X connection to the RedHat host?

Cheers,
Kurt