Re: Is font fallback slow over X11/ssh?

[Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca>]

>>>> Is font fallback slow over X11/ssh?
>>> FWIW, yes, it is.  And thatʼs one of my reasons to prefer
>>> server-side font rendering for remote Emacs sessions.
>>> I. e. something like:
>>> 	$ emacs --xrm='Emacs.fontBackend: x'
>> Interesting.  Do you have some explanation for why you find it more useful for remote sessions?
> No, in the sense that @yuri.v.khan@gmail.comʼs one is more thorough than mine.

My question was based on my foggy memory that back when client-side
fonts (xft) were introduced to the wonderful X11 world, there was some
article that came out explaining that while it requires sending the
bitmap of characters to the Xserver, it ends up being faster in remote
connections because the amount of data to send is not really larger than
the amount of data fetched from the Xserver for server-side fonts
(mostly in the form of the font-metrics) and suffers much less from
latency because it's "send-only" instead RPC.

>> Have you tried to *disable* the `x` fontBackend instead?
> Yes, in fact due to bug#25216 this is my normal setup.
>
> 	! https://bugs.gnu.org/25216
> 	Emacs.fontBackend: xft,ftcrhb
>
> Why _it_ could help, I wonder now?

The idea was that it would avoid paying the cost of the `x` backend.


        Stefan