Re: Thin Client Benchmark Testing

[Federico Mena Quintero <federico ximian com>]

On Tue, 2005-11-01 at 13:01 -0500, Dave Richards wrote:

> Our most common device is an NCD Explora 451, circa 1996.  Up to GTK
> 2.6 they have worked fine.  They obviously aren't as fast as new
> devices, but work well for the GNOME desktop, Evolution, OpenOffice
> and Firefox.
> 
> Our new thin clients are HP devices, running 800Mhz Crusoe chips with
> a mini-Linux kernel on them.

I just ran a quick test on my ridiculously fast P4.

If I use "X -extension RENDER :2" to disable the RENDER extension, and
run a gnome-session in that server, everything is *incredibly* slow.

We seriously suck when the RENDER extension is not presesnt.

I don't know yet why that happens.  Interestingly enough, running
sysprof shows that *all* the time (94%) goes to the X server.  I wonder
why that happens, since, well, aren't we falling back to doing
everything client-side?

Your best bet is to see what GTK+ does in the fallback code that makes
it so slow.

  Federico