Franklin Hays wrote:
> > Which X toolkit(s) does it use?
>
> gtk+-1.2.8, hope this is what you are referring to.
I think (not sure) that gtk+ is a heavy user of imlib.
> very slow to initialize then performance is fairly good until opening up
> UltraScan, then it slows to a crawl again.
At that point, you're schlepping lots of large graphics, right?
The startup time is probably caused by lots of network round trips
while the app queries the X server about everything under the sun
and sets a jillion properties on every button, slider, scrollbar,
and nose hair. VNC should pretty much eliminate this delay.
The large graphics are going to continue to be a problem. Compression
may help. In a former life, I once rewrote an app to calculate
exactly which pixels changed from frame to frame, fit them into
minimal spanning rectangles, and update only those parts of an X
serverside pixmap. That was in the days of 10Mbps Ethernet and 25 MHz
CPUs. It helped immensely in that case, but mostly because the
graphics were small objects on a solid color background.
Are you able to modify the source to Ultrascan?
Ssh, while still a good idea securitywise, won't speed anything up on
Ethernet -- ssh itself uses most of the CPU to saturate a 10 Mbps
Ethernet, and your CPU is elsewise occupied (unless you have an SMP
box). I don't know how fast VNC's compression is.
The final answer may be to move to a higher-bandwidth network or put
the app directly on the end-user's computer. I assume that there's
some compatibility or licensing issue that kept you from doing that
in the first place.
Here's another way-off-the-wall idea: bootable CDs. (-:
--
K<bob>
[EMAIL PROTECTED], http://www.jogger-egg.com/
