This is the mail archive of the
cygwin-xfree@cygwin.com
mailing list for the Cygwin XFree86 project.
Re: Performance problems on slow Win98 computers
- From: Jay Smith <jay at JaySmith dot com>
- To: cygwin-xfree at cygwin dot com
- Date: Sun, 04 Jul 2004 19:39:37 -0400
- Subject: Re: Performance problems on slow Win98 computers
- Organization: Jay Smith and Associates
- References: <40E7E495.1040405@shemesh.biz>
- Reply-to: cygwin-xfree at cygwin dot com
Shachar,
I would also take a look at the amount of video memory available and the
video card itself.
We have a similar setup on some machines except that they are 300 or 400
MHZ processors but we are running Windows 95 instead of 98. The important
thing, however, is that when we switched from Gnome to KDE, performance
(graphics speed) declined about 30% and Cygwin/X crashes increased from one
per week to as many as 4 per day. The number of crashes depends upon how
many X applications are being run -- and how many dialog boxes get opened.
The best way to crash a machine is to print from Linux/KDE Mozilla (using
CUPS) a number of times. Printing 15 jobs is about the limit -- Cygwin/X
will crash. We have a weekly time-sensitive "job" we have to do that
involves printing about 100 web pages within a one hour period. It takes
two people and three computers to do it -- one person to do the printing
and the other person to restart Cygwin/X and get the programs running again.
Anyway, 200 MHZ is pretty slow to run widget-rich KDE. One thing we did
that helped a bit was to use a KDE desktop scheme that has smaller, less
complex icons. With that each user might only crash once per day (unless
they start printing...).
Jay
Shachar Shemesh said the following on 07/04/2004 07:05 AM:
Hi all,
I'm trying to use a win98 computer (about 200MHZ) as a full screen dumb
terminal to a Linux computer running KDE, using XDMCP. Everything works,
but I'm having severe latency problems with this setup.
When I switch to faster computers, the latency problem goes away. The
problem seems to be with the cygwin/X load on the computer.
I have read somewhere that cygwin's X will use a shared memory driver if
one is available. Could me not running the driver be the cause? Where
can the driver be found (what cygwin package)? Or is it just that the
computer is simply not fast enough to run our X server?
Another question has to do with shift processing. When I run xev, I can
see that pressing the right shift causes a "LSHIFT" to be received. This
is blocking certain applications that switch paragraph direction using a
ctrl+lshift or ctrl+rshift combination. Is this a configuration problem
on my end?
Shachar