Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!wuarchive!brutus.cs.uiuc.edu!apple!agate!shelby!csli!keith
From: keith@csli.Stanford.EDU (Neil Hunt)
Newsgroups: comp.windows.x
Subject: Memory for Pixmaps - DEC Pmax Xcfb2 server.
Keywords: Movie loops, memory, Pixmaps, XImages.
Message-ID: <10833@csli.Stanford.EDU>
Date: 30 Oct 89 22:27:07 GMT
Sender: keith@csli.Stanford.EDU (Neil Hunt)
Reply-To: Neil%teleos.com@ai.sri.com (Neil Hunt)
Organization: Teleos Research
Lines: 28

I am trying to build an image display window which will allow me to
show short animations by displaying a series of colour images in rapid
sucession.  Use of XPutImage is very slow (seconds or 100s of mS per frame),
so I rewrote to send all my images to Pixmaps in the server, and use
XCopyArea (10..100 times faster).  Unfortunately, after loading about
10 frames of 256x92 8 bit frames (only 235kbytes) the server dumps +Mbyte
core and quits, with no explanation.  This is is on a DECstation 3100
(Pmax) colour machine, running DEC's Xcfb2 server (11R3).

I was hoping to build a system which would run with up to say 10Mbytes
of image data stored in the server [my suntools version runs OK with 20+ M,
it just takes 10 minutes to get all the pages resident at once and everything
else swapped out properly!]

1. Any ideas for a fix? (currently I have no room for X server sources on
   my machine - otherwise I might fix the server!)

2. Is this behaviour expected on other similar machines - eg suns - where
   one might expect to see enough VM for the server to grow pertty large?

3. Are there better ways to do this within X?

Thanks,

Neil/.		Neil%Teleos.com@ai.sri.com	...decwrl!argosy!teleos!neil

PS: Is anyone out there using InterViews for working with images?  Has
anyone developed something better than InterViews Color and Raster classes?