gson@blob.hut.fi (Andreas Gustafsson) (03/28/91)
Archive-name: graphics/fractals/mandelspawn/1991-03-27 Archive: funic.funet.fi:/pub/unix/X11/expo.lcs.mit.edu/ms-0.05.tar.Z [128.214.6.100] Original-posting-by: gson@blob.hut.fi (Andreas Gustafsson) Original-subject: Re: X11 mandelbrot toy? Reposted-by: emv@msen.com (Edward Vielmetti, MSEN) In article <1991Mar22.225126.15124@dsd.es.com> rthomson@dsd.es.com > (Rich Thomson) writes: >>>The only mandelbrot viewer I've seen for X11 is blindingly fast (uses >>>a distributed computing approach) on a network, >> >>No wonder our network is so slow ... [...] > >Actually, I've noticed that I can be stealing cycles from some >people's workstations and they don't notice ;-}. MandelSpawn's computation server process runs at nice 10 by default. This means that whenever there are other runnable processes on the workstation, the computation server on that machine virtually stops. MandelSpawn will dynamically reassign its portion of the image to another workstation if necessary. >I imagine it could get things bogged down if *every* user was >browsing the M-set, Because there is only one computation server process running on each machine, the available idle CPU cycles would be shared among the M-set-browsing users but the load would not increase any more than in the single-user case. >Actually, mandelspawn could be made *lots* more efficient if it >cached the already computed results. A full-window exposure causes >the entire image to be recomputed. Sigh. Recent versions of MandelSpawn request backing store from the X server in order to avoid unnecessary computation when a window is exposed. >(Also, it only seems to work on screens with a default visual of >PseudoColor) StaticGray should also work but gives only boring black-and-white images. If someone volunteers to write the code necessary to support other visuals, I will gladly incorporate it into the next release. It is currently missing mainly because I don't have access to any machines with default visuals other than PseudoColor or StaticGray. The current version of MandelSpawn is available by anonymous FTP from funic.funet.fi, in /pub/unix/X11/expo.lcs.mit.edu/ms-0.05.tar.Z. -- Andreas Gustafsson (author of MandelSpawn) Internet: gson@niksula.hut.fi Voice: +358 0 563 5592