Re: slow Remote X-windows displaying...

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

"Daniel M. German" <dmg@csg.uwaterloo.ca> writes:
> 
> Yes, I pondered it, and I tried it. It does not seem to affect the
> speed of the rendering. Specially that I am comparing a small window
> in GNOME with a large, graphical Netscape Windows. The gnome one
> loses. Somehow it looks like the netscape window is able to cache its
> contents and redisplay them. But the gnome/gtk window has to redraw
> all its content. I have tried it without compression and the result is
> essentially the same.
> 
> I also tried to use the default theme. It seems to speed it up things
> a little bit, but it is still slower than other windows.  Again,
> Netscape seems to redisplay the entire contents of the window almost
> instantly, while I can see a gtk window redrawing its contents when it
> is asked to be displayed again.
> 
> To the gtk gurus: does that make sense? Are there windows
> (motif/lesstif/X) that are quicker to redisplay because they have
> buffered their contents, but gtk/gnome has to redisplay everything
> again?
> 

That explanation doesn't seem right, if you're just talking about GTK
widgets like buttons and such they should be equivalent to Motif
widgets.

If you're talking about a custom display like a web page in Netscape
or something in a particular GTK app, it's possible those are done
very differently. In particular canvas-based displays like Gnumeric
are probably quite slow over a network connection, because Gnumeric's
display is basically a giant image that has to be pushed over to the
server.

Havoc