On Thu, Apr 09, 2009 at 09:31:01AM -0400, Jim Gettys wrote: > If you look at our paper here: > > http://keithp.com/~keithp/talks/usenix2003/ > > You'll discover that the font metadata turned out to be as large as > the glyphs actually used. > > And client side fonts with server caching therefore turns out to be a > wash as far as bits transferred in practice, while avoiding a huge > number of round trips to get font metadata (which was always > inadequate), and *horrible* for application performance at starup.
At least in theory you do not need more than one round trip per used font to get font metadata. Bulk-sending the list of supported characters and associated metrics in one message for caching in the client makes sense. Sending the list of existing fonts is costly but otoh "fc-list :"'s result is 20 times smaller than "xlsfonts"'s. > So the X11 core font design is fundamentally a mistake, which we fixed. Someday somehow I'll try to do some tests to check whether that's really true with a better optimized protocol, because right now everything that uses xft over a ssh tunnel is an horrible pain in the ass, while stuck-in-the-past applications like xemacs are way, way more responsive. OG. _______________________________________________ xorg mailing list [email protected] http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/xorg
