Re: Why is Emacs so slow when used remotely?

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

>> This is not useful, if you only work with text.  The X protocol is not
>> significantly worse than any other terminal protocol to send over text.
> Font rendering/antialiasing/composition nowadays happens mostly at the
> client side if I am not mistaken.  That makes the X protocol much worse
> even with text.

Apparently it doesn't have to be that way: client-side rendering
requires sending pixmaps to the server, whereas server-side rendering
requires sending font-metadata to the client.  Depending on the
particular situation either one can be faster than the other.

Apparently, if the pixmaps get appropriately cached, the amount of data
in either case, for some mythical "typical" situation, has been measured
to be comparable, while the client-side rendering benefits from the fact
the sending pixmaps to the server is much more latency-tolerant than
querying font metadata, which requires a lot round-tripping.
It sounded very counter-intuitive to me, but it came from some USENIX
article by one of the head X guys, IIRC.


        Stefan