Jef- The first thing to do is figure out why it is unusable. I'm assuming the performance is slow. This is usually caused by too much network traffic. There may be better tools out there, but I usually just run the classic xosview, which will tell you how much bandwidth the server network cards are using:
xosview -load -page -int +net You may have to install this app to run it, but it is a handy tool to have. Otherwise, there are many network load monitors for Gnome, KDE, etc. Run the XUL app and look at the network usage (ideally, there won't be other clients in use at the same time). If you are running 100Mbit cards to the terminal, then network usage will likely sustain around 8-9MB/s (that's megaBytes, not megaBit), which is the limit of 100Mbit networks. OK, assuming the network is the limiting factor, why does this happen? Because the application is drawing everything to a back buffer in memory, and then blasting the whole buffer to the screen at one time. This makes local applications flicker-free, because the eye doesn't see drawing operations happening as they progress across the screen, and once the drawing is complete in the back buffer, it is easy to move the whole rectangle to the graphics card in one shot. However, for a network terminal, moving that whole rectangle dozens of times per second over the wire is very inefficient, especially since only a few pixels change from one frame to the next. If this is happening in your XUL application, the only way to make it work efficiently over a remote display is to somehow disable the back buffer. This is also why Java Swing/2D applications run poorly over a remote terminal, unless you pass in the "-Dsun.java2d.pmoffscreen=false" option to java, which disables the offscreen buffer and greatly improves remote performance. Hope this helps, -Todd jef peeraer wrote: > i have an xul app ( remote ) that's intended to run on thinclients. It > runs ok on a single client, but on thinclients it's almost unusable. > I've googled and found some posts about it, but it's still a bit > unclear. Do i have to disable the caching of firefox ? ( which seems to > take up a lot of memory on the behalv of x11 ) ? Or maybe i should try > to run firefox locally ? > > jef peeraer > > ------------------------------------------------------------------------- > Take Surveys. Earn Cash. Influence the Future of IT > Join SourceForge.net's Techsay panel and you'll get the chance to share your > opinions on IT & business topics through brief surveys - and earn cash > http://www.techsay.com/default.php?page=join.php&p=sourceforge&CID=DEVDEV > _____________________________________________________________________ > Ltsp-discuss mailing list. To un-subscribe, or change prefs, goto: > https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/ltsp-discuss > For additional LTSP help, try #ltsp channel on irc.freenode.net > ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Take Surveys. Earn Cash. Influence the Future of IT Join SourceForge.net's Techsay panel and you'll get the chance to share your opinions on IT & business topics through brief surveys - and earn cash http://www.techsay.com/default.php?page=join.php&p=sourceforge&CID=DEVDEV _____________________________________________________________________ Ltsp-discuss mailing list. To un-subscribe, or change prefs, goto: https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/ltsp-discuss For additional LTSP help, try #ltsp channel on irc.freenode.net
