Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!seismo!sundc!pitstop!sun!decwrl!labrea!rutgers!apple!bloom-beacon!SUN.COM!dshr
From: dshr@SUN.COM (David Rosenthal)
Newsgroups: comp.windows.x
Subject: Re: X Performance
Message-ID: <8812112304.AA07903@devnull.sun.com>
Date: 11 Dec 88 19:33:04 GMT
Sender: daemon@bloom-beacon.MIT.EDU
Organization: The Internet
Lines: 37

Tony Burzio writes:

> According to several sources I found, the SUN X server is not only
> unoptimized, but de-optimized (HP and NBS).
> 
All together now,  say after me:

	"I believe everything the salesman says to me
	because he has my best interests at heart"

As one of the people responsible for the Sun port,  and for its admittedly
less-than-adequate performance I can assure you that I am not part of a
conspiracy.  The reasons bear repeating for the xpert listeners who weren't
around in the early days when we were struggling to turn the hype into
reality.

At the start of the alpha-test phase of X11,  Adam de Boor of UCB and I
did the first ports of X11 to something other than the monochrome uVAX.
We put our efforts together,  and gave the code to MIT.  Sun also got the
server running on color hardware for the first time and donated the
code to MIT.  We wrote the book ("Godzilla's Guide") on porting X11,
and spent considerable time helping HP use our code to start their
X11 porting effort.  Both the monochrome and color Sun drivers were
deliberately designed to be extremely portable rather than to provide
good performance.  The reason for this was that during the alpha-
and beta-test phases of X11,  very few ports were available and thus
the system was not getting adequate testing.  We were trying to
make it as easy as possible for others to port to their hardware,
to make X11 something people could actually use.

Since then,  we (like others in the industry) have been building a
an X11 product (in our case,  X11/NeWS).  We have not had effort to divert
from this to speeding up the MIT sample server.  Doing so is not hard -
Purdue has done some work and anyone with the ability to profile the server
will find obvious areas for further work.

	David.