Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!ames!ucsd!rutgers!ucla-cs!mujica@ra.cs.ucla.edu
From: mujica@ra.cs.ucla.edu (S. Mujica)
Newsgroups: comp.windows.x
Subject: Re: A Thought on X Terminals
Message-ID: <21032@shemp.CS.UCLA.EDU>
Date: 27 Feb 89 06:25:50 GMT
References: <8902262128.AA04910@devnull.sun.com>
Sender: news@CS.UCLA.EDU
Reply-To: mujica@ra.cs.ucla.edu (S. Mujica)
Organization: Computer Science Dept. UCLA
Lines: 49
In-reply-to: dshr@SUN.COM (David Rosenthal)



In article <8902262128.AA04910@devnull.sun.com>, dshr@SUN (David Rosenthal) writes:
>
>	"Don't,  don't believe,  don't believe the hype."
>		Public Enemy
>
...

The argumentation in David Rosenthal's message is based on the fact
that X servers may grow very large when complex applications are run.

He also says that X terminals defeat the purpose of X because their
limited memory size does not allow to run complex clients that demand
large amounts of space in the server.

I do not think that X terminals defeat the purpose of X because of
memory size: do we believe that today's hardware limits will be valid
one year from now?... How much space do highly-demanding clients
require?...  How many highly-demanding clients do we want (or are
prepared) to use simultaneously?...

It is true that the size of the server will depend on the clients
being run and how they allocate resources.  This is a limitation for X
terminals, and it is also a limitation for workstations, diskless and
with local disk.

If a workstation is used instead of an X terminal the amount of swap
space that can be used is also limited--just throw in a Lisp process,
a few more usual-Unix-processes, and the X server won't be able to
find a lot of space to grow.

In an X terminal the limit may be a few Mbytes, in a workstation the
limit may be larger (maybe much larger) than in a terminal. But in any
case the limit WILL BE there.

Isn't David Rosenthal pointing to a basic limitation in the design of
X rather than in the X terminal concept?

"...
>	safely.  Overloading it with complex clients which use server
>	resources to implement a high-performance graphical user interface
>	is dangerous - clients will start to crash randomly (hardly
>	user-friendly behaviour).  If all you want from X is a way of
..."


Sergio Mujica,    mujica@cs.ucla.edu
Computer Science Department, UCLA