Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!husc6!bloom-beacon!SUN.COM!dshr
From: dshr@SUN.COM (David Rosenthal)
Newsgroups: comp.windows.x
Subject: Re: Some Xsun Benchmarks
Message-ID: <8812200451.AA07570@devnull.sun.com>
Date: 20 Dec 88 01:13:39 GMT
Sender: daemon@bloom-beacon.MIT.EDU
Organization: The Internet
Lines: 25

Far be it from me to discourage people from profiling the server and
speeding it up.  I have been trying to persuade people to do this
ever since R1,  and I am not trying to justify any particular piece
of code in the server - I believe that there is a lot of scope for
tuning.

However,  beware the "optimize the idle loop" syndrome.  Ouputting
a large number of characters one at a time is a truly bloody stupid
thing to do with X.  Speeding up this and making no other change to
the server will not make any real application faster.  Fixing any
application that does output many characters one-at-a-time to do
something more sensible will make more difference to that application
than any amount of server tuning.

If you are going to profile the server and find things to speed up
please look at it doing something realistic,  not "charstones".  I
have seen more effort wasted optimizing to unrealistic benchmarks
than I can remember.

In particular,  if you are reading the keyboard and mouse all the time
there is something wrong.  The Sun server uses SIGIO and should never
read them unless there is something there to read.  Use trace(1) to
find out whether this is so.

	David.