jdavis@gollum.UUCP (James P. Davis) (04/19/89)
Has anyone looked at the relative differences in performance between an X based windowing systems (like, for instance, OPEN LOOK or Motif) and Presentation Manager under OS/2. It seems that X is going to be slower, given the overhead of a networked environment, but has anyone examined this with a test application or benchmark that they can share their findings? Is it a few percent or an order of magnitude? If I am thinking about PC's versus X displays (where client and server are on different machines), is the performance difference going to be enough to sway me towards buying an OS/2 "workstation" rather than an X display (ignoring the difference in cost and availability, or lack thereof, of applications)? Any enlightenment is most appeciated. Jim Davis NCR Advanced Systems Development West Columbia, S.C. jdavis@gollum.Columbia.NCR.COM
jdn@mas.UUCP (Jeff Nisewanger) (04/22/89)
In article <3024@hound.UUCP> smikes@hound.UUCP (S.MIKES) writes: >In article <219@gollum.UUCP>, jdavis@gollum.UUCP (James P. Davis) writes: >> >> Has anyone looked at the relative differences in performance between an >> X based windowing systems (like, for instance, OPEN LOOK or Motif) and >> Presentation Manager under OS/2..... > >Jim, > >There is a BIG difference between X and OS/2-Presentation Manager, and I >mean BIG! For one thing, it would be unfair to even attempt to do a >one on one comparison between UNIX(tm) based systems with X versus OS/2 >and Presentation Manager -- the big loser would be OS/2, for the following >reasons: > >(1) OS/2 itself is hardly a stable operating system environment -- quite >the opposite of UNIX which is probably the most debugged operating system >ever written, even MVS. What is the basis for comparison. If you compare the kernel and base system software I think OS/2 is very stable. I have done a fair amount of system programming for it and am quite impressed by its stability. I have seen several major Unix ports that were buggier. OS/2 almost never "panics" even when pushed hard. Presentation Manager is a bit touchy but the base OS/2 kernel is very solid and the system calls to it are mostly well designed. If you compare feature sets Unix wins in the area of protection mechanisms but OS/2 wins big in other areas. It can page virtual memory into an ordinary filesystem. It supports multiple "threads" per process. It has a flexible process priority scheme. It has named-pipes which can be used to build "servers" that can be accessed in a completely network protocol independent way (by relying on the Lan Manager distributed filesystem). It can be painlessly tuned by editing config.sys with a text editor. It has dynamically loadable device drivers; no kernel re-linking bullshit. Installation is massively less weird than many Unix installation mechanisms that I've seen. >(4) OS/2 still has several problems; among them is the major issue of how >it is to support concurrent execution of native OS/2 and native DOS >applications -- it can't. This is a 286 limit. OS/3 will doubtless support this. >(5) OS/2 is a resource pig. Granted, X is not much better, but given that >X is implemented on UNIX based systems, the underlying operating system >takes care of sharing the available memory, disk, and other system >resources. This is one area in which OS/2 is still hurting, primarily since >it is still relatively new. The typical OS/2 system requires a minimum of >2 or more megs of RAM and at least an 80286 processor. The OS/2 developement >environment requires even more, and a huge chunk of disk space. It is >poorly supported by comparison to X, if you don't believe this, try calling >IBM or Microsoft for OS/2 technical support sometime; Microsoft will try >to answer basic or simple questions, but when the call involves deeper >involvement the tech support guys tell you that you should buy a $500.00 >per yer subscription to ONLINE, their SIG on GEnie(tm). When you combine Unix and X together you will chew up about the same amount of resources, at least. Disk space for Unix/X development will take AT LEAST as much room as OS/2. Try running Unix/X11 on 2mb. OS/2 technical support is at least as good as any Unix/X11 support I have ever encountered. > >(11) There are no toolkits or extensions yet available for OS/2 or >Presentation Manager; take a look at Andrew, Xt, OpenLook(tm), OSF/Motif, >or any of the other extensions available from DEC, Sun, Hewlitt-Packard, >AT&T and several other members of the X Consortium. > Part of Presentation Manager is the standard PM toolkit. It is in most ways equivalent to the facilities provided by other windowing toolkits but unlike many windowing toolkits for X it provides general coordinate transformations, stored display lists etc. It has better support for mouse hit detection within a graphic drawing. It has outline font support. It has a PostScript imaging API for wide lines, fancy clipping and sophisticated outline font effects. There is also now a Microsoft endorsed C++ toolkit from Glockenspiel Ltd. for PM that is source-code compatible for compilation on MS-Windows and X11/NeWS as well. I haven't seen the details yet but it is potentially a much better long-range solution than various other toolkits that attempt awkward "object-oriented" programming in plain C (the standard PM toolkit clearly belongs in this list.). PM also has a plan for supporting printing. There is coherent answer supplied for the X domain. The big drawback for PM is the lack of network transparency. It could also use more flexible graphics contexts and some of the calls are a little awkward. Nothing in life is perfect. I also feel awkward defending Microsoft/IBM software. They do put out a lot of crud but as far OS/2 and the basic capabilites of PM I think they have done a much better job than you give them credit for. Jeff Nisewanger Measurex Automation Systems ....apple!mas1!jdn
jdavis@gollum.UUCP (James P. Davis) (04/26/89)
------------------------ I thought that I would repost, in case somebody missed it. Is *anybody* looking at this? Or, is it proprietary? ------------------------ Has anyone looked at the relative differences in performance between an X based windowing systems (like, DECWindows, OPEN LOOK, or Motif) and Presentation Manager under OS/2. It seems that X is going to be slower, given the overhead of a networked environment, but has anyone examined this with a test application or benchmark that they can share their findings? Is it a few percent or an order of magnitude? If I am thinking about PC's versus X displays (where client and server are on different machines), is the performance difference going to be enough to sway me towards buying an OS/2 "workstation" rather than an X display (ignoring the difference in cost and availability, or lack thereof, of applications)? Any enlightenment is most appeciated. Jim Davis NCR Advanced Systems Development West Columbia, S.C. jdavis@gollum.Columbia.NCR.COM
jordan@cs.columbia.edu (Jordan Hayes) (04/27/89)
James P. Davis <jdavis@gollum.UUCP> asks: Has anyone looked at the relative differences in performance between an X based windowing systems (like, DECWindows, OPEN LOOK, or Motif) and Presentation Manager under OS/2? I was told by Bill Gates that PMX (Presentation Manager under Unix?) was going to be (should be done by now?) implemented on top of X ... Can anyone confirm or deny? I was also told (not sure by who) that HP was doing (did?) it. /jordan