peter@sugar.hackercorp.com (Peter da Silva) (04/18/91)
Here's an anecdote that might give some idea of how perceived speed of a system can vary in non-standard ways. There was this SCADA system... oil-field monitoring and control... being developed at this place I worked. The customer was complaining that the system was too slow. It was rendering displays to a character-graphics screen over a serial line, and the update was reasonably fast, but the database access was slow. So the first change was to remove the display optimisation. This actually slowed things down because the boxes and pipes and stuff were getting redrawn over each other, but the customer was pleased... it looked like the system was responding faster. All but one part, where it had to go out to the field and poll the RTUs or something. The fix? Put a little red box on the screen that said "working" before performing that operation. Complete satisfaction from the customer, even if that little red box made the operation take longer. On the Amiga, you hit a box and the system responds immediately. The programs are smaller and load faster, so they open windows immediately when you start them up. Under X, even with shared libraries, you have to page a significant amount of code in to start up an app. Perhaps, if the standard allows it, it might be possible for the app to contain a magic cookie that tells the window manager the desired window size, so the user can be moving that rubber band line and resizing it while the program is loading? -- Peter da Silva. `-_-' <peter@sugar.hackercorp.com>.