Neil%Teleos.com@ai.sri.com (Neil Hunt) (08/09/90)
I just ported an application from the Decstation 3100 to a SparcStation 330, and I have to confess that the openwindows implementation left me somewhat underwhelmed. I believe it was openwindows 2.0 FCS. I found that drawing operations on the window were moderately fast (perhaps .8 times the speed of the DecStation), but any interactions involving the window manager seemed horrible, perhaps only 10% the speed of the DecStation. For example popping up a new window (or menu), moving windows, unburying windows, resizing, etc. The worst is the mouseahead problem. This is when you select `focus-follows-mouse' instead of `click-to-focus'. If there is anything at all happening on the machine, when you move the mouse from one window to the another, and start typing, for a few _seconds_ the keystrokes are sent to the wrong window, probably a few are lost altogether while the window manager wakes up, and finally they start arriving at the indicated window. I _have_ noticed this on the DecStation, but only when there is exceptional activity, such as multiple simultaneous large compiles, or a large core-dump happening, but it is _much_ worse on the Sun. This seems like a fundamental X windows bug, which ought to be fixable. I wonder why it still persists? Furthermore, the olwm seems to fail to differentiate between classes of windows: e.g. application windows or transient windows; all my windows were decorated, whereas under twm my transient windows remain undecorated and hence smaller and faster. I also dislike the way the windows are placed pseudo randomly on the screen instead of having an opportunity to place them explicitly with the mouse. For the record, my application is developed using the InterViews package of C++ classes. I also tossed out most of the DecWindows stuff, and installed generic X clients, although the Dec X server is apparently much faster than the generic X server. I am interested in people's experiences with making the window system adequately fast. Do you chuck the olwm and use something like twm? Is it better to get the generic X implementation from the X consortium rather than use sun's extended X server with display postscript extensions, or is that slower still? Is there a 2.0 after FCS? (The Sun rep I spoke to asked whether I had used OpenWindows 2.0, and wasn't it amazingly fast!) How is it on a SparcStation 1+ compared to a 330? Does the GX option do anything? Neil/. Neil%teleos.com@ai.sri.com