Ideas for a brand new widget toolkit

[H. S. Teoh]

On Thu, Aug 15, 2013 at 08:35:20PM +0200, Joakim wrote:
> On Thursday, 15 August 2013 at 16:44:21 UTC, H. S. Teoh wrote:
> >On Thu, Aug 15, 2013 at 06:03:35PM +0200, Wyatt wrote:
> >>On Thursday, 15 August 2013 at 14:50:43 UTC, Joakim wrote:
> >>>
> >>>Sure, but X forwarding is still laggy, as you pointed out.
> >>>
> >>I think that's only because it's a naive, uncompressed
> >>implementation.  Proper protocol compression pretty much removes
> >>that for most use cases.
> >[...]
> >
> >I've run X11 forwarding over a compressed SSH tunnel before. It's
> >actually usable. Not fast, but usable. (And this was over the
> >internet, not in a LAN, which would be significantly faster.) I used
> >to run X11 forwarding over an uncompressed channel, and it was
> >unusably slow.
> I've only done X11 forwarding over ssh, both WAN and LAN, it was
> incredibly laggy in both cases.

You need to run ssh -C, otherwise it just goes uncompressed plus the
overhead of encrypting/decrypting each packet.

But yeah, it's not exactly fast. Definitely can't play FPS's over it. :)


> >X11 was really designed for server + many workstations LAN setups,
> >and it still works pretty well in those scenarios. It was never
> >designed to be used over WANs, so it performs poorly when your link
> >goes through the internet. It also wasn't designed for desktop apps,
> >though modern X servers bypass most of the performance overhead by
> >extensions that allow direct memory mapping between the server and
> >client, so you could, e.g., directly access VRAM once it's negotiated
> >with the server.
> What is the latency or bandwidth threshold that X11 needs?  I've found
> it slow even with low latency and plenty of bandwidth, ie over a local
> LAN.  "It also wasn't designed for desktop apps:" what was it designed
> for then, xterm and xclock and that's it?
[...]

Sorry, I was unclear, I meant that it wasn't really intended to have the
server and client both run on the same box. Of course, this problem is
largely alleviated by X extensions that allow direct memory mapping
between server and client. But the base protocol wasn't really designed
for optimized localhost communication (needing to talk to a localhost
server via sockets adds a lot of overhead, esp. given X11's verboseness
in terms of protocol).


T

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