From: kankkune@klaava.Helsinki.FI (Risto Kankkunen) Subject: X size&performance (was: Offical windows) Date: 2 May 1992 00:10:20 GMT
drew@ladymacb.cs.colorado.edu (Drew Eckhardt) writes:
>In article <1992May1.085711.10120@csd.brispoly.ac.uk> cj_watts@csd.brispoly.ac.uk (Chris Watts) writes:
>>start for X windows is a 33Mhz 386 with at least 4MBytes ram and 100Mbytes
>>disk space for all the executables.
>
>This is VERY implementation specific.
Undoubtly.
I just checked our X11R5-tree and it's 14 megs for binaries and 22 megs
for the architecture independed stuff (fonts, man pages, bitmaps). The
server itself is less than 1.5 megs.
>In my experience :
>
>1. 16M of memory on an RS/6000, running AIX 3.x, normal daemons (ie printer,
> networking, etc), local disk, is intolerable. 32M is very reasonable.
>
>2. 8M of memory on an HP9K series running a diskless Mt. Xinu
> 4.3 BSD is intolerable.
>
>By intolerable, I mean the cursor, or xterms freezing when parts of
>the X clients or X server are paged in from local disk, or NFS. Sometimes,
>this delay can be measured in seconds, and the resulting lag between the
>mouse pointer and the mouse movement makes menu selections virtually
>impossible.
Never experienced performance this poor. On a diskless Sun 3/60 with 4
megs, X11R3 was not snappy, but certainly very useable. With shared
libraries (i.e. X11R4) it was very responsive.
>Also, what else will you do when running X? GCC2 will eat 1.5M of
>RAM for itself, and if optimizing large programs may require
>three times that.
By the way, compiling some parts of the X distribution with Sun's cc
requires more than 100 megs of virtual memory...
--
no sig today