🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <20635@netnews.upenn.edu> bradley@grip.cis.upenn.edu (John Bradley) writes:

John> Yes, but has anybody actually PLAYED with these things?  I attended the 
John> Philadelphia unveiling and got to try out a 320, a 530, and an X terminal.

Yes.  We have one here in the Computer Science Department.

John> All three of them exhibited X performance that ranged from mediocre to 
John> sluglike, depending on the operation.

What IBM told us when we complained about the performance of the X software
was that there is a large amount of debugging code that is still in place
but will be removed by the time the product really ships.  Wink, wink,
nudge, nudge. ;-)

John> In particular NONE of the three beasties could move bits to/from the screen
John> quickly enough.  (as in, displaying/refreshing an image, and scrolling a
John> region)

Actually we can make the X server crash on demand my moving the mouse
quickly while keying the buttons in rapid succession.

John> The scrolling was particularly bad, mainly because it's the thing you're
John> most likely to be using.  I was unable to scroll an 80x24 xterm (say a
John> resolution of approx 600x350 (or so)) at much better than 2-3 lines per second.

John> This is right up there with a color Sun running the original cfb code from
John> X11R1...

John> While I can think of a host of reasons why it might be slow on the 320 and
John> the 530 (lots of annoying background jobs, or something), the Xterminal was
John> just as slow.  I killed all other clients that were going to the Xterm, and
John> it STILL couldn't scroll the screen at an acceptable rate, making me think the
John> thing is utterly useless.

Not to mention exspensive.  The ~$US 2K price IBM is touting is without a
monitor!

John> Anyhow, I can't imagine HOW IBM could make the X server SO slow.  The X11R4
John> server for my RT 125 Megapel is MUCH faster...

It is all that debugging code. ;-)

John> Or, perhaps the machines here were set up by complete bozos...

John> John Bradley  -  University of Pennsylvania  -  GRASP Lab
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Dan Ehrlich <ehrlich@cs.psu.edu>
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