topic x-windows performance in Operating System - HP-UX

x-windows performance

Michael Murphy_2 — Wed, 11 Aug 2004 11:12:52 GMT

I am having user complaints that the weblogic gui performance on our machines is lacking. This is probably due to the fact that uses use x-windows softare (hummingbird exceed) to display windows that are coming over the lan from a server machine in another city. I seem to remember a setup that would increase x-windows performance by locating a "screen server" on the local lan - anyone have this kind of setup? Any other suggestions on how to improve performance? Thanks

Re: x-windows performance

john kingsley — Wed, 11 Aug 2004 11:32:59 GMT

Have your users try tuning their Exceed Client.
Run Xconfig (from the Exceed Folder):
Performance --> Tune... --> Run All

Also, check which Window Manager Exceed is configured to use:
Xconfig --> Screen Definition --> Window Manger: (We have this set to X)

Check the Server Visual setting:
Xconfig --> Screen Definition --> Server Visual
Running PseudoColor can cause problems depending on the desktop. We typically run True Color. But not all applications will support True Color if you pcs are configured to 32 bit color.

It always a good idea to run "Tune" whenever you change your Exceed settings.

Re: x-windows performance

Bill Hassell — Wed, 11 Aug 2004 11:57:17 GMT

As a general note, a LOT of code that uses Xwindows but has a Windows background can be incredibly inefficient, generating thousands of short Xwindow queries. These queries are things like: do you have blue? do you have room for 1000 horizontal pixels? do you you have a mouse? and so on). On a 100BaseT local network everything seems fine. But trace the actual startup or run the link over a slow modem (28k or less speed) and you'll probably see a huge amount of traffic. The local network won't demonstrate this problem but a wide area network (another city) will magnify the problem enormously. This is due to the turnaround time in the network. ping can sometimes show this...values in the hundreds of ms will drastically reduce overall throughput, even though the link is a T1 or even a T3.

One way to see this effect is to resize an Xwindow image that is being sent from a remote WAN server. You may see the image 'stepping' up or down which is normally invisible on a fast network. There is no fix for this except to place the machine running the program on a local LAN. Perhaps the term "screen server" is what is being defined above although the terminology is incorrect. In Xwindows, the client is the program and the server is the screen (PC or Unix running Xwindows).