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From: jg@jumbo.dec.com (Jim Gettys)
Newsgroups: comp.arch,comp.unix.wizards,comp.os.misc
Subject: Re: Big Programs Hurt Performance
Message-ID: <965@jumbo.dec.com>
Date: Sun, 4-Oct-87 20:03:52 EDT
Article-I.D.: jumbo.965
Posted: Sun Oct  4 20:03:52 1987
Date-Received: Wed, 7-Oct-87 07:10:05 EDT
References: <1665@ncr-sd.SanDiego.NCR.COM) <8579@utzoo.UUCP) <6886@eddie.MIT.EDU) <948@jumbo.dec.com> <856@sugar.UUCP>
Reply-To: jg@jumbo.UUCP (Jim Gettys)
Organization: DEC Systems Research Center, Palo Alto
Lines: 29
Keywords: cost of bloated programs
Xref: mnetor comp.arch:2511 comp.unix.wizards:4688 comp.os.misc:266

In article <856@sugar.UUCP> peter@sugar.UUCP (Peter da Silva) writes:
>Apologies. I had gotten the impression that X was a sort of super-escape-
>sequence protocol. Probably because I styill haven't been able to get hold
>of any sort of description of the system unless I want to fork out a hundred
>bucks for the full tape.
There is a paper in Transactions on Graphics which came out a couple
months ago about X.  You might look there.

>I have also been told that X was huge... as in, an Atari 1040ST with a MEG of
>standard RAM wouldn't support it. How big's the server, really?

Here are the server sizes under Version 11, on a Vax.
text    data    bss     dec     hex
335872  32768   21268   389908  5f314   Xqdss  (server for GPX color display)
297984  20480   17132   335596  51eec   Xqvss  (server for straight bitmap)

The server on my GPX's size, after running for some days, is 778k.
Note that there are a number of ways to make server dynamic data sizes
much smaller; the server as distributed is optimized toward speed
and simplicity.  At the cost of a bit of work, the size of data used
dynamically can be shrunk alot.

Neither of these implementations has been optimized yet,
and are mostly based on a complete set of machine independent graphics
code which comes with the distribution.  Much of this code may be
unneeded on machines which have graphics code in ROM, or in hardware
if the hardware or ROM can perform the correct operations.  I expect
many production servers to be smaller than above.
				Jim Gettys