rsharma@bnr.ca (Ramaprakash Sharma) (04/06/91)
Has someone tried running Xwindows from home on a 9600 baud? How is the performance when about 5 to 8 windows are open and 'vi' is run? Any suggestions are appreciated. -ram
jim@ncd.COM (Jim Fulton) (04/09/91)
Disclaimer: Yes, I work for a company that has a good X-over-serial (NCD: Xremote) product that runs X in the terminal instead of the host, so I'm biased. Has someone tried running Xwindows from home on a 9600 baud? Yes (I'm typing this from home dialed in over a 9600 baud line). How is the performance when about 5 to 8 windows are open and 'vi' is run? Pretty good. It depends on how many things are happening at once. It keeps up with me when I type (I type about medium-fast). I use it for reading mail, some text editing, an occasional diagram in FrameMaker, and a little debugging. It works especially well when you're running a window manager locally (i.e. not over the serial line). Any suggestions are appreciated. Focus on compression schemes since the number of bits being stuffed down the wire determine how fast it will go. Raw SLIP is pretty painful. Compressed TCP-header SLIP is better, but still has a lot of extra bytes. Compressing the data stream helps a lot as does filtering out the redundancies inherent in the X protocol and caching information on the host side. This is the approach used in NCD's Xremote and efforts at other companies of which I've heard rumors. Another tact taken by GraphOn (at least) is to put the X server up on the host and then do graphics escape sequences and input codes over the wire (I'll leave it to Mark or Casey to elaborate). This has some speed benefits but does make it harder to run local clients (such as the window manager mentioned above), which may or may not be important to you. If you send email to info@ncd.com you can get product info on Xremote. Jim Fulton NCD