Re: xmosaic experience

Marc Andreessen (marca@ncsa.uiuc.edu)
Thu, 25 Feb 93 15:32:00 -0800


Guido.van.Rossum@cwi.nl writes:
> Regarding Bill Jansen's experience, I read in his message a question
> that you haven't answered but which perhaps lies at the core of his
> complaint: the way I read it, he believes that you write the text
> *once* into a background pixmap and then scroll it around. I can't
> believe this is true. If indeed it isn't true you should perhaps
> explain why it takes so long to read the RFC in (is it just slow ftp
> or are you doing lots of processing?) and whether it is true that
> the X server should be chewing up CPU? Could it be that Bill's
> server is too eager to do backing store and generates an exposure
> event for the entire subwindow? (Perhaps Xmosaic can set a resource
> that disables this behavior?)

It's not storing a huge window-sized pixmap -- that would take one
hell of a lot of memory. It's letting the X window mechanism generate
appropriate expose events and repainting on the fly. Parsing a
document that long and finding out how to break it up into document
pages just plain takes a while -- but, for what it's worth, it will
take less time in 0.9, for reasons I'm not even going to go into here.

Marc

--
Marc Andreessen
Software Development Group
National Center for Supercomputing Applications
marca@ncsa.uiuc.edu