On Wed, Aug 02, 2017 at 01:14:18PM +0200, Michael Traxler <[email protected]>
wrote:
> If I use the inconsolata font or any other xft-font the display is very
> fast on a local X-server, but quite slow via vncviewer, even on a
> localhost-connection with a 8-core CPU without compression and quality=0.
>
> The problem: on a notebook 4k display I'm forced to use xft as there are no
> pixel-fonts available which are big enough.
I feel your pain. I was/am frustrated at the constant "xft is much
better/cooler/faster even over the network" propaganda and then having to
deal with buggy/slow/incomplete APIs all the time.
> Is there any way to convince urxvt or the X-server to somewhat pre-render the
> font and speed this up and reduce the amount of transferred data to the
> X-server?
Well, Xft does pre-render fonts, and both Xft and the core fonts more or less
send similar amounts of data to the server, which then uses a glyph cache to
put glyphs on screen. The difference must be something else.
Most likely, the tigervnc simply has a very slow Xft rendering pipeline, and
the solution probably would be a faster one.
> urxvt is a factor of *27* slower than konsole (actually, my reason to change
> to urxvt 6 years ago was, that urxvt was so much faster than konsole at that
> time :-) ).
That's quite interesting, and probably worth an investigation, but the
answqer might simply be that konsole will happily skip text output to a
much larger extent than urxvt, so konsole might be faster not because
it is drawing faster, but simply because it isn't drawing anything. Or
konsole might have a different drawing path. Or you use a non-charcell
font and konsole might give garbled output while urxvt is forced to render
slowly for correct output. Or konsole indeed has a better drawing path,
or konsole is lucky and is faster with tigervnc and slower with other
servers. In the end, we might not find out and have to live with the
situation and change terminal emulators.
Also, let's not forget that it's tigervnc that has this problem, so
the best solution for slow tigervnc would be a faster tigervnc - other
x-servers obviously can be fast.
Antialiasing might be a thing to think about, yet:
> urxvt-256color: -fn xft:Inconsolata:pixelsize=30:antialias=false:style=Regular
You already switch it off.
What you can try is to use scalable font as a core font, off-hand I don't
know how to best achieve that, but most likely you have to put the ttf
font into your fontpath (mkfontscale and xset fp are your friends), and
see if it renders faster through the core protocol. Another option is to
convert the ttf font to a xore font (e.g. using otf2bdf).
The problem is that most ttf fonts are simply not charcell fonts but
proportional fonts (the problem with xft is that even monospace fonts are
typically proportional fonts and urxvt might need to slow down rendering
by rendering every single character separately. Which probably isn't your
problem, though).
> ls --color=tty -R /usr/share/doc 0,16s user 0,24s system 2% cpu 19,047 total
> ls --color=tty -R /usr/share/doc 0,17s user 0,15s system 32% cpu 1,022 total
> ls --color=tty -R /usr/share/doc 0,16s user 0,19s system 49% cpu 0,703 total
That indeed indicates that the slow part is the x-server, as all three
temrinal emulatoprs use roughly the same time here and the slowdown is
external.
> Any hints where I have to change settings to speed things up in
> urxvt/urxvt-256color?
It doesn't seem that the slowness is inside urxvt here, but specifically
inside tigervnc. As such, all you cna do is try various different vodoo
methods and hope some of them don't trigger slowness in tigervnc.
If you try out any of the above, don't forget tpo give feedback to this
list, even if ultimately don't work :)
--
The choice of a Deliantra, the free code+content MORPG
-----==- _GNU_ http://www.deliantra.net
----==-- _ generation
---==---(_)__ __ ____ __ Marc Lehmann
--==---/ / _ \/ // /\ \/ / [email protected]
-=====/_/_//_/\_,_/ /_/\_\
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