jm36+@andrew.cmu.edu (John Gardiner Myers) (04/22/89)
I usually don't deal with X, but the other day I was helping a friend profile xtrek. From my work with "WM", CMU's window manager, I know that the three things that have to be fast in a windowing system are IPC, BitBlt, and string drawing (in the common case). From the output of gprof, I find that string drawing has a prohibitive cost in the Xlib routines. For example, XTextWidth() is responsible for over 99% of the calls to malloc() and makes an equal number of calls to free(). These calls are simply unnecessary. Other Xlib routines dominating the top of the list were XDrawString(), GetGlyphs(), XDrawImageString(), and GetCS(). -- _.John G. Myers Internet: jm36+@andrew.cmu.edu (412) 268-2984 LoseNet: ...!seismo!ihnp4!wiscvm.wisc.edu!give!up "Whenever faced with a problem, some people say `Lets use AWK.' Now, they have two problems." -- D. Tilbrook