Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!ncrlnk!ncr-sd!hp-sdd!hplabs!decwrl!labrea!rutgers!apple!bloom-beacon!SUN.COM!dshr
From: dshr@SUN.COM (David Rosenthal)
Newsgroups: comp.windows.x
Subject: Re: Resource limits and backing store.....
Message-ID: <8812112224.AA07280@devnull.sun.com>
Date: 11 Dec 88 19:11:54 GMT
Sender: daemon@bloom-beacon.MIT.EDU
Organization: The Internet
Lines: 30

I don't want to sound too much like Cassandra,  but I hope the folks
pushing non-virtual-memory X terminals read this from Jon Greenblatt:

> 	I have been having trouble with the server running out of memory when
> running a large program using backing store. My default datasize is
> set to 6 meg but this is not enough when running some realy hungry X programs
> such as XPS.

I have pointed out for a long time:

-	that current X11 clients fail abruptly as soon as they get an Alloc
	failure from the server,
-	that making them survive Alloc errors is hard,  because of the
	asynchronous nature of error notification,
-	that current X11 clients make little use of the memory-consuming
	parts of the X11 protocol,  because these are the parts that weren't
	there in X10,
-	and that this is skewing our ideas of how much memory an X11 server
	in normal use will require.

Unless the X community works out how to write clients that don't simply
collapse at the first hint of resource exhaustion,  the suppliers of X
terminals are going to have a lot of VERY unhappy customers.  Remember,
my experiments over a year ago showed that even a 0.5% alloc failure
rate rendered the system totally unusable.

I have seen no discussion of this problem in the past year.  I hope you
all out there aren't just sticking your heads in the sand......

	David.