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From: mattf@cac.washington.edu (Matthew Freedman)
Newsgroups: comp.windows.x
Subject: Re: Not impressed with MacX (performance)
Message-ID: <12402@milton.u.washington.edu>
Date: 6 Dec 90 00:41:33 GMT
Sender: news@milton.u.washington.edu
Reply-To: mattf@cac.washington.edu
Organization: University of Washington, Seattle
Lines: 35

So far in the discussion of Mac-X under MacOS nobody has mentioned
anything about problems with the performance. For my application, the
performance is so bad as to make Mac-X unusable. Since nobody else seems to
be experiencing these difficulties, maybe I am doing something wrong (I
hope so, I really want to be able to support MacX).

I have developed a medium size Motif 1.0 application on a DecStation 3100.
It has three seperate windows and a moderate number of pull-down
menus, buttons, sliders etc. I recently ran it on a Macintosh IIci, under 
Mac-X, or more precisely ran it on the DecStation, but displayed it
under Mac-X.  Everything works, but it is *slow*. I mean real slow. It
takes on the order of 5-10 seconds just to pull down a menu. And at
least 10 seconds to expose a window.  

Other standard X clients seem to work reasonably fast, although I haven't
tried too many.  I can't think of any client with the same level of
complexity in terms of the number of individual widgets to compare my
program against.

Does anybody have any ideas what the problem could be?  Is it the large
number of individual widgets/gadgets that X has to deal with in any
application with a nice GUI?  Is there something wrong with Motif?  Is
it just the layering that is going on with Mac-X under finder?  Would
moving to Motif 1.1 make a difference? Would not running in color make
a difference?

I haven't tried A/UX yet, has anybody had any experience with Motif
displayed in that environment?

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= Matthew M. Freedman                                                 =
= U. of Washington Information Systems       mattf@cac.washington.edu =
= 4545 15th Ave. NE; 4th Floor               (206) 543-5593           =
= Seattle, WA  98105                                                  =
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