Re: emacs 22 horribly slow over vpn/dsl

[Tim X]

Mark Hood <invalid@invalid.invalid> writes:

> Mark Hood <invalid@invalid.org> writes:
>> I had been using Emacs 21.3 over a 1500/768 kbps DSL line through
>> VPN to an X11 server running on Windows XP in my home office without
>> a problem, but with the new version, it's horribly slow.  Startup
>> takes forever, and C-v takes about 2 seconds.
>
> It looks like the vertical scrollbars are the culprit for the 2 sec
> page scroll.  I turned them off and Emacs became usable again.
> Startup still takes forever though.
>
> Apparently the GTK+ scrollbars in Emacs 22 are very heavyweight.  The
> Emacs 21 I was using was built with the X Toolkit scrollbars and it
> works much better for remote X11 usage.
>
> Interestingly, the -D and --basic-display startup options don't seem
> to have any effect on the scrollbars; Emacs starts up with a
> heavyweight display always.
>
> I miss the lightweight scrollbars so I guess I'll have to build Emacs
> 22 or 21 myself.  I'll probably stick with 21 since it seemed to start
> much faster.
>
> -- Mark

You can build emacs 22 with the old X toolkit rather than GTK+, which should
give about the same performance as you had with emacs 21. 

The other thing to consider would be to use one of the X compression utilities.
When I had to run X over a slow connection, I found this made the connection
very usable. I can't remember the exact name, but it was something like X
differential compression protocol (xdcp?) or something similar. 

Tin

-- 
tcross (at) rapttech dot com dot au