Linked by lopisaur on Fri 25th Jun 2010 22:21 UTC
Thread beginning with comment 431667
To view parent comment, click here.
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
To view parent comment, click here.
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
XCB supposedly improves network performance considerably, but no toolkits use it as of yet.
I believe X.org (and actually Xlib) already uses XCB, but overall X11 performance is still very bad. Doing ldd against almost any X11 applications shows a dependency on libxcb.so - how much of XCB it uses, I don't know..
$ ldd gnome-terminal
...
libuuid.so.1 => /lib/libuuid.so.1 (0xb7231000)
libxcb.so.1 => /usr/lib/libxcb.so.1 (0xb7217000)
libpixman-1.so.0 => /usr/lib/libpixman-1.so.0 (0xb71d4000)
...
$ ldd xmag
...
libxcb.so.1 => /usr/lib/libxcb.so.1 (0xb7c4f000)
...
$ ldd /usr/lib/libX11.so.6
linux-gate.so.1 => (0xb8085000)
libxcb.so.1 => /usr/lib/libxcb.so.1 (0xb7f67000)
...
It's not just the remote protocol in X11 that is slow, everything related to windows are slow. I have a rather fast Nvidia and ATI video card, with proprietary drivers installed, but performance is not even close to what I get when I reboot into Windows. Simply dragging a window around shows tearing on the edges, dragging Firefox around using OSNews site shows really bad draw artifacts (never seen under Windows). The list goes on.





Member since:
2006-01-18
Actually even the remoting of X is protocolwise lousy, while it scaled perfectly for a few lines widgets like the Athena widget, it falls flat on its face with complex modern UIs trafficwise. You need protocol hacks to get the dataload down.
People have been saying that X sucks for 10 years and I agree it might be the time to either let it rest or make a huge overhaul into X12 instead of doctoring around on X11.