The "loop and a half"

[Grant Edwards]

On 2017-10-09, Marko Rauhamaa <marko at pacujo.net> wrote:
> Grant Edwards <grant.b.edwards at gmail.com>:
>
>> On 2017-10-09, alister via Python-list <python-list at python.org> wrote:
>>
>>> or if you want the luxury of a GUI editor simply ssh to the remote
>>> machine & run the editor there (using X forwarding to route the
>>> display to you local PC)
>>
>> AFAICT, most modern GUI toolkits are no longer usable via X forwarding
>> at sub-gigabit network speeds. The toolkit designers have botched
>> things up so that even the most trivial operation requires hundreds of
>> round-trips between server and client.
>
> Yep.
>
> Funny thing is, xterm runs nicely over a 9,600-baud line, but there's no
> hope to get Firefox, Evince or the like to run over a 1,500,000 bps
> connection.

Most of the "old-school" apps that use athena or motif widgets work
fine.  There are a a couple more modern toolkits that still work
right: the last time I tried an fltk, it seemed OK.

But, both GTK and QT are hopeless pigs.

Xemacs can be built so that it works fine remotely -- but if you're an
emacs user you generally don't care. It's simpler to just run emacs on
the remote machine via a normal "tty" connection.

> Latency is more of an issue than throughput,

That's true, I should have been more precise.

> indicating that those round-trips are sequential. X11 was designed
> to be pipelined but the toolkits can't pipeline themselves.

-- 
Grant Edwards               grant.b.edwards        Yow! Am I SHOPLIFTING?
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