Re: [SLUG] Improving Xserver preformance

From: Eben King (eben1@tampabay.rr.com)
Date: Sat Aug 28 2004 - 15:45:34 EDT


On Sat, 28 Aug 2004, Robert Snyder wrote:

> Well after playing around with the demos for all the major Commerical
> Windows Xservers... ended up picking up eXceed for just over 60
> dollars under an educational licence. While it feels the fastest
> out of them all. I need to figure out where I am having a bottleneck.
>
> Windows side
>
> P4 2.4ghz
> 768 megs DDR 333
> GF2 Pro 64 meg DDR ( I just dont play alot of games )
> Broadcom Net Extreme Gigabit Nic connected to a WET11 Wireless to
> Eithernet Bridge (802.11B)
> Windows XP Professional SP2
>
> Server
> P3 500E ( socket 370 not Slot 1)
> i810 Chipset with on board 4 megs video memory not shared.
> 192 Megs pc 100
> Linksys WMP11 The orginal with the Prism 2.5 chipset.
> Suse 9.1 Professional
>
> Now I trying to figure out where my bottle net could be.

IME it's the latency that gets to it. X apps are used to running locally,
where if the app asks the X server something, it can get an answer in
microseconds. Then you're trying to run X on a LAN machine (worse, one
connected by 802.11b, a half-duplex protocol), where the latency is
measured in milliseconds (1000 times greater). I used to run Mozilla
(when I _had to_) from a machine in Gainesville (latency of dozens of ms).
It took about three minutes to start up, but once it was up it was not
obnoxiously slow.

I don't know what you could do to improve that, besides simplifying the X
protocol.

> I tried putting in more ram into the server and even though i have the
> correct ram ( speed and timing ratio) the board is just plan old
> picky SOB....

I don't think it would matter how fast either end is, or how fat the pipe
in between is (the machine in Gainesville was on a 100 Mbps LAN a couple
hops from an OC-12, I am on a 100 Mbps LAN one hop from a cable modem),
but rather the end-to-end time.

-- 
-eben    ebQenW1@EtaRmpTabYayU.rIr.OcoPm    home.tampabay.rr.com/hactar
SAGITTARIUS:  All your friends are laughing behind your back... kill
them.  Take down all those naked pictures of Ernest Borgnine you've got
hanging in your den.  -- Weird Al, _Your Horoscope for Today_

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