Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!asuvax!mcdphx!hrc!uucs1!gaf
From: gaf@uucs1.UUCP (gaf)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.sysv386
Subject: Re: X performance improved more by?
Keywords: X, ESIX, 80387, memory
Message-ID: <386@uucs1.UUCP>
Date: 21 Jan 91 21:16:00 GMT
References: <9788@b11.ingr.com> <2840@sixhub.UUCP> <67@oink.UUCP>
Reply-To: gaf@uucs1.UUCP ()
Organization: UUCS inc., Phoenix Az
Lines: 33

In article <67@oink.UUCP> jep@oink.UUCP (James E. Prior) writes:
>
>You need to have enough RAM to avoid swapping, but that's all.  
>
>If you are serious about wanting to do faxt X, then by a late model 
>video board THAT IS ALREADY SUPPORTED WITH A DRIVER FROM YOUR UNIX
>VENDOR, that has a graphics CPU.  

I would agree with these comments.  bitblt operations on our Orchid
ProDesigner VGA were terribly slow - to the point that our terminal
emulator program ran at an effective rate of 2400 baud.  Tests showed
that it was the bitblt operations involved in scrolling a line at a time
which was the bottleneck.  We switched to an 8514/A video board and are
quite happy with it (except that it takes another interrupt, of which
there are precious few).

We also checked our memory situation by using the u386mon program which
came across Usenet some months back (no doubt available from any archive
site).  Out of our 8 Mb system, 6.4 Mb was available to non-kernel
processes.  By the time our ISC 2.2 system was booted and running the
usual set of daemons (nothing of our own - just inetd, nfsd, etc), only
2.8 Mb was left to real user programs.  Starting the X server, the Motif
Window Mgr, and a single xterm client left us with about 500 Kb (!) for
useful work.  A Motif program can easily consume 1 Mb of memory, and we
found we were swapping immediately.  System performance really suffers
when that happens.

High on the list of things I want now is a shared library version of
the various X and Motif libraries.  That would make life more bearable.
-- 
Guy Finney					It's that feeling of deja-vu
UUCS inc.   Phoenix, Az				all over again.
ncar!noao!asuvax!hrc!uucs1!gaf	sun!sunburn!gtx!uucs1!gaf