%% Salman Ahmed <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: Nathan> It's faster to use a "UNIX domain socket" when all traffic is Nathan> local as you avoid some of teh overhead of an IP stack. Why Nathan> waste those milliseconds?
sa> Would you be willing to explain the technicalities behind that ? Sounds sa> like a neat `optimization'. BTW, is this a Debian-specific feature ? I sa> haven't seen this in RedHat. The big advantage of using :0 or unix:0 is that on systems that support it, it allows the client and server to communicate using _shared memory_ segments. This is _significantly_ more efficient than having to pass data buffers through the entire IP stack, even if it doesn't go over the wire. Think of the buffer copying being saved... Look at the output of xdpyinfo and find the extension MIT-SHM... that's the shared memory extension. On Linux 2.x, all X servers (that I'm aware of) support it. This feature is available to all versions of X11 (on systems that support it)... that is, it's a feature of X11 in general, and not specific to XFree86, and certainly not specific to Debian's version of XFree86. sa> Now for a networked system, you'd have to change the DISPLAY env var sa> to allow remote X clients to display locally, right ? On the remote X client, you'd need to use the local hostname in DISPLAY, yes. Local clients can still use the efficient :0, of course, regardless of whether there are remote clients or not. -- ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Paul D. Smith <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Network Management Development "Please remain calm...I may be mad, but I am a professional." --Mad Scientist ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- These are my opinions---Nortel Networks takes no responsibility for them.