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From: bradley@grip.cis.upenn.edu (John Bradley)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc.rt
Subject: Re: Risc System/6000
Message-ID: <20635@netnews.upenn.edu>
Date: 20 Feb 90 23:08:52 GMT
References: <90051.101319ANKGC@CUNYVM.BITNET> <24325@princeton.Princeton.EDU>
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Reply-To: bradley@grip.cis.upenn.edu (John Bradley)
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Organization: Grasp Lab
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Yes, but has anybody actually PLAYED with these things?  I attended the 
Philadelphia unveiling and got to try out a 320, a 530, and an X terminal.

All three of them exhibited X performance that ranged from mediocre to 
sluglike, depending on the operation.

In particular NONE of the three beasties could move bits to/from the screen
quickly enough.  (as in, displaying/refreshing an image, and scrolling a
region)

The scrolling was particularly bad, mainly because it's the thing you're
most likely to be using.  I was unable to scroll an 80x24 xterm (say a
resolution of approx 600x350 (or so)) at much better than 2-3 lines per second.

This is right up there with a color Sun running the original cfb code from
X11R1...

While I can think of a host of reasons why it might be slow on the 320 and
the 530 (lots of annoying background jobs, or something), the Xterminal was
just as slow.  I killed all other clients that were going to the Xterm, and
it STILL couldn't scroll the screen at an acceptable rate, making me think the
thing is utterly useless.

Anyhow, I can't imagine HOW IBM could make the X server SO slow.  The X11R4
server for my RT 125 Megapel is MUCH faster...

Or, perhaps the machines here were set up by complete bozos...

John Bradley  -  University of Pennsylvania  -  GRASP Lab