Re: [levoy@cs.stanford.edu: Poor performance over DSL link]

[storm@cua.dk (Kim F. Storm)]

Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org> writes:

>     As it happens, I finally realized (by watching the rhythm of the traffic)
>     that Emacs 21's software blinking cursor was causing the traffic.
> 
> I am surprised that blinking every .5 second causes so much traffic.
> 
> Does this cure the sluggishness too?
> 
>     We should add this to PROBLEMS.
> 
> Yes, once we are finished understanding the situation.

There were other X-related problems on slow WAN links.  

AFAIR the problem was related to emacs constantly allocating and
releasing colors on the X-server, and requesting the list of fonts
from the X-server.  

I made some changes for 21.1 (which Gerd used) to improve this by
caching some of the information, and it did make a fairly significant
difference.

But there were still several areas which could be improved - but it
would be non-trivial to do so, either because X-servers have different
capabilities, or because the "excessive" traffic was partially caused
by some of the X-library functions.  

So it was put on hold until after 21.1.  (Un)fortunately, in the
meantime I've got a much faster WAN link (1024/256 ADSL), so I no
longer experience the problems I had with the 64k ISDN link, and thus
I don't have a personal interest in improving this anymore.

I'm afraid I no longer have the correspondance with Gerd and Richard
on this issue; any chance that either of you still have a copy [I think
my email address at the time was stormware@get2net.dk] ?

> 
>     Since the other suggestions mentioned there to improve performance can
>     be controlled via the Options->Show/Hide menu [PROBLEMS could mention
>     that], we might consider to add a menu item for controlling the
>     blinking cursor as well, e.g Option->Show/Hide->Blinking Cursor
> 
> Ok.

Would the maintainer of the "show/hide" menu please do this?

-- 
Kim F. Storm <storm@cua.dk> http://www.cua.dk