ike@planck.stanford.EDU.STANFORD.EDU (Ike van Cruyningen) (04/14/88)
I do image processing work on a Sun workstation and would
like to add a menu interface for our routines. I am evaluating
SunView, NeWS, and X Windows as bases to build on. I like
the portability aspect of X Windows, but am concerned about
communication bandwidths.
In image processing one deals mostly with raster operations
on 8 bit pixels. Locally we achieve about 100 KBytes/sec over
the network, so it would take about 10 seconds to update a
1024*1024 (or 1150*900 Sun) screen. This is not a crisp,
interactive user interface.
Hence I am considering a standalone situation where the
server and client are the same machine. My questions are:
1) What is the approximate bandwidth of communication
between the server and display using internal inter-
process communication? How much communication time
is there after the server has finished the image
processing algorithm on the image in memory and
when it shows up on the display?
2) Is there any way to short circuit the communication
protocols in a standalone application to allow
direct memory copies or even shared memory?
(My apologies to the protocol developers - I may be
trying to use a 'standard' outside its intended
function). This is likely a machine dependent
'feature', so are is anyone (DEC, HP, etc) adding
it to their server implementations?
I would like to make the menu software as portable as
possible, but I cannot take too big a performance hit.
I hope I don't have to use a proprietary, kernel based
window system (SunView?) to obtain the performance.
I apologize if this is a naive question or if it has already
been discussed. I am new to X Windows and could not find
an answer on the first pass through the documentation.
I thank you in advance for any replies. Please note
I have succeded in utterly confusing our mailer (and myself!)
so the return address above may be incorrect. It should read
ike@planck.stanford.edu (36.65.0.23).
Ike van Cruyningen
Dept. of Mech. Eng.
Stanford University
(415)-723-3188
ike@planck.stanford.edu