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From: news@bbn.COM (News system owner ID)
Newsgroups: comp.windows.x
Subject: Re: Speeding up Sun 4 X?
Summary: Flames on many megs
Keywords: Megabytes, memory hog
Message-ID: <50334@bbn.COM>
Date: 3 Jan 90 16:12:02 GMT
References: <33410@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU> <9001021710.AA11011@dart.cs.byu.edu>
Reply-To: pplacewa@antares.bbn.com (Paul W Placeway)
Organization: Bolt Beranek and Newman Inc., Cambridge MA
Lines: 38

mike@DART.CS.BYU.EDU (Mike Burbidge) writes:
< The developer's version of OpenWindows 1.0 is a terrible memory hog. It uses
< about 5.7 meg of runtime memory.
  ... [two good hacks for xnews users] ...
< At this point you
< will have a server that uses under 2.5 meg of runtime memory.

Ga!  (I usually won't use such an example, but in this case I have to
make an exception:) At this point, the server is about 10 TIMES the
size of the bitmap and windowing code in a Mac.  Now I could under-
stand a doubling in size (after all, extra space is needed to run
the server side of the network interface), but 10?!?!?

I just checked, and the (X11R3) xsun running on my 3/50 is 520K, with
less than 200K resident.  This isn't bad (still too fat, but not bad).

In the "Sun-Day" talk about Open Windows / X11/News, the Sun
representative said that Sun officially recomends no less than 8 meg
to run OW in (and she prefers 12).

I personally don't see any reason why a workstation with 4 meg (real)
shouldn't be able to support a kernal, a window system, and a useful
application or three.  Really, more memoy is great, but it should be a
*luxury* to make things run faster.

I expect the X servers from MIT to be a bit big, because they are
demonstrations of new ideas, with size a low concern, and the vendor
implimentations be carefully trimmed to work well on their hardware.
Unfortunately, I don't think this will be the case.  I can see Sun
trimming xnews by 50% if they are _real_ careful, but that will still
leav it at just under 3 TIMES the size of the X11R3 refrence server.

Ga.  Will I need 128 Meg in my machine in 1999, just to edit files?
Remember when Unix ran on a 64K machine?

		-- Paul Placeway <pplaceway@bbn.com>
		   (ocassionally accused of feeping creatureism,
		    usually correctly :-) )