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From: peterson@milano.UUCP
Newsgroups: comp.windows.news
Subject: Re: NeWS speed
Message-ID: <4557@milano.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 15-May-87 17:45:41 EDT
Article-I.D.: milano.4557
Posted: Fri May 15 17:45:41 1987
Date-Received: Sat, 16-May-87 15:53:06 EDT
References: <1116@mit-amt.MEDIA.MIT.EDU>
Sender: peterson@milano.UUCP
Organization: MCC, Austin, TX
Lines: 43
Summary: simple comparison

In article <1116@mit-amt.MEDIA.MIT.EDU>, simsong@mit-amt.MEDIA.MIT.EDU (Simson L. Garfinkel) writes:
> A friend of mine said that AI group at MIT is never going to be running
> NeWS on many workstations. One of the reasons he gave was that X will
> always be at least a factor of 3 faster than NeWS.
> 
> I started thinking about all of the atoi() that news always has to do, 
> and the fact that it is interperted, and am beginning to think that he
> might be right. Is there any truth to this?

We have both NeWS and X running on our Suns (and Andrew and Suntools
and ...) and have been trying some simple tests lately.  As a simple
comparison of the two systems we wrote a program in C for X that
creates a full-screen window then creates 1089 subwindows of that
full-screen window, 33 rows of 33 columns.  Each window is 50% larger
than the space between its neighbors, so all windows overlap.  Each
window has a line drawn 5 pixels in from its edges (to form a box) and
is labelled with its number (1 to 1089) centered in the box.  After
all windows are created, they are "raised to top" starting from 1089
down to 1.  No events handled, so X paints the overlaps with the
default background.

Running with the display server on another Sun over an ethernet,
it takes X 53 seconds (real time) to do this. 

Taking the same program and replacing each X call with a call to a
Postscript function, and writing a CPS file which defines these
functions, the same program takes NeWS 55 seconds (real time).

(Our Postscript programmer complained bitterly about this test
because he said that if he had been asked to do this, he would have
either written the whole program in PostScript, or at least written
all the code for one subwindow creation in PostScript -- he would never
have simply imitated the X request structure).

What does this prove? Nothing, necessarily. Neither code was optimized;
the Sun X server is obviously not polished code (although neither is
NeWS). This one test may or may not be typical of the use that you want
to put either program to.  But there is no evidence that either is
necessarily terribly worse than the other, from a performance point
of view.
-- 
James Peterson
peterson@mcc.com  or  ...sally!im4u!milano!peterson