Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!rutgers!ukma!gatech!bloom-beacon!athena.mit.edu!martillo
From: martillo@athena.mit.edu (Yakim Martillo)
Newsgroups: comp.windows.misc
Subject: Re: Why I'm suspicious of NeWS
Message-ID: <2940@bloom-beacon.MIT.EDU>
Date: 13 Feb 88 12:59:12 GMT
References: <2936@bloom-beacon.MIT.EDU> <3847@megaron.arizona.edu>
Sender: daemon@bloom-beacon.MIT.EDU
Reply-To: martillo@athena.mit.edu (Yakim Martillo)
Organization: Constellation Technologies
Lines: 14

>You won't see *effective* bandwidth anywhere near a gigabit any time
>soon, especially for small messages like most of those X shuffles
>around.  And it's not the physical bandwidth of the network
>dominates the cost, it's the CPU time spent packing up messages, doing
>traps, changing (heavy weight) contexts, fielding interrupts, copying
>(or mapping) messages into user address space, etc.

The Xlib routines actually buffer up the messages to send to the
remote until the process XFlush()'s them into the kernel for
transmission.  Improperly coded X programs could probably generate
zillions of little packets crossing the application kernel boundary
but a competent coder would not write his routines that way.
Incompetent NeWS programming could probably generate zillions of little
NeWS programs for transmission.