Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!mcsun!ukc!mucs!cns!umaida!jf
From: jf@ap.co.umist.ac.uk (John Forrest)
Newsgroups: comp.windows.x
Subject: Re: Yet another R5 wish
Message-ID: <1990Jul25.090108.20038@cns.umist.ac.uk>
Date: 25 Jul 90 09:01:08 GMT
References: <3287@rsiatl.UUCP> <1990Jul23.150058.3327@axion.bt.co.uk>
Sender: usenet@cns.umist.ac.uk (Usenet news user)
Reply-To: jf@ap.co.umist.ac.uk (John Forrest)
Organization: UMIST Computation, Manchester, UK.
Lines: 42

In article <1990Jul23.150058.3327@axion.bt.co.uk>,
crouch@crunchie.axion.bt.co.uk (Chris Rouch) writes:
|> In article <3287@rsiatl.UUCP>, meo@rsiatl.UUCP (Miles ONeal) writes:
|> |> (Chris Rouch) writes:
|> |> 
|> |> |One of the major problems we've had since upgrading to X11R4 is the size
|> |> |of the applications.
|> 
|> |> Have you tried either shared libraries, or the -n (shared code)
|> |> link option? The first works well of you run a mix of applications;
|> |> the latter works well if lots of people run the same (few)
|> |> applications.
|> |> 
|> |> -Miles
|> 
|> Hmm. This may help on a mult-iuser system with X terminals hanging off
|> it, but on single-user workstations it's not going to make a lot of
|> difference. Or am I missing something?
|> 

Yes you are missing something. A typical Athena widget took (I imagine
the other toolkits are similar) will have about 300K of code which is
purely support code/Intrinsic (these are Apollo figures). You might have
10 or so of these tools running simultaneously (adding to run-time
memory usage) and many tools on the disk (adding to disk space). This
soon mounts up. If you use some form of shared libraries you only have,
in theory, one copy of the Intrinsic code, and if you arrange it so, of
those widgets that are commonly used. That is a bit idealised, since
there is an overhead of shared libraries. I don't know about the Sun
technique, but our Apollo inlib (shared library) is probably about twice
the size of the non-shared equivalent (mainly extra symbol table?).
However, it is still worth it. We have build the X tools directly for
Apollos, but quite frankly its not worth it unless you have 64M memory
and 1Gbyte disks per machine.

John Forrest,
Dept of Computation
UMIST.

PS. Those people who have been asking for instructions on how we built
XR4 with inlibs - at the beginning of next week I will try and package
the stuff up and post in on news.