Suresh asked: > > > Has anyone come across X applications re-engineered for low bandwidth > > > networks, This in the context of thin clients.
On Mon, 31 May 2004, Suresh clarified: > Latency is not an issue, > I am looking at a deployment where I have a 1MBPS upstream and 6MBPS > downstream bandwidth, > The bandwidth issue comes from the fact that the number of users is going be > high, a few hundreds. Hence the effective bandwidth per user is going to > drop with the number of simultaneous users going up, that's when the > response is going to become less predictable. Ah. Lower bandwidth, but much like coax ethernet which many (the majority ?) of X setups used in the early years. My experience of those days was with monochrome displays, which reduced the bandwidth needed for images, and text dominated graphics, not like the image-rich environment today. If you can persuade your users to go back to the style of X applications of ten years ago you may find them perfectly usable. We uses a lot of 25MHz Sun SLCs and 33MHz Sun ELCs, so you are likely to have a lot more cpu available, for things like ssh compression. Your original subject was "Reengineering X applications" - what sort of reengineering are you able to do ? Are you thinking of suppling a small number of apps which have been modified to make most effective use of your network ? I do remember hearing that one version (4?) of netscape used a ridiculous number of pixmaps - perhaps 60 for a single window, which does lead towards image overload. The XFree86 shadowfb module renders into a memory framebuffer and optimizes refreshes of out of date rectangles. IIRC this helped netscape performance a lot on graphics cards with slow framebuffers. I think this was used in a VNC driver for XFree86 (not part of XFree86 for GPL reasons, but available at http://xf4vnc.sourceforge.net/ ). If all your apps are going to be running on a remote machine anyway, you may find that something like VNC performs better than X over your wires. [Apologies to the nomachine people for not commenting on NX, I've never used it and your site appears to be down, so I can't refresh my memory.] _______________________________________________ Devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://XFree86.Org/mailman/listinfo/devel
