Re: [xougen] GPL-ed X compression scheme -- my gaff

[Shawn]

Just as another quick note, my experience with NX has been a delightful
dream thus far.

ssh+X+bs-wm loses the fight to NX for money. This is accessing my
AthlonXP 2400+ over my cable uplink from a scrawny windows XP laptop.

On Wed, 2003-10-01 at 04:43, Rich Wareham wrote:
> Per Cederberg wrote:
> > Thanks for the detailed explanations! I guess I should 
> > really try installing NX one of these days... (Not that
> > I really need it, but it does sound interesting.)
> 
> This is /totally/ unscientific but here are my experiences with NX. Its
> not intended as a rant just so people can get an idea of what it's like:
> 
> I've got a nice beefy Gentoo box hanging off my University connection
> but sometimes I want to access it from a common-room I use a fair
> amount. This room is equipped with (by today's standards) pretty poor
> Celerons running Windows 2000/NetWare.
> 
> I installed NX because a) the Windows client is small and easy to
> install and b) because on Gentoo you can type 'emerge
> nxserver-personal-server' and magic occurs :)
> 
> Upshot: Even with the bandwidth turned up to maximum, NX is /really/
> slow on these machines. I now just use the XFree86 pulled out of the NX
> client and forward X over ssh (with compression) using PuTTY. Blam!
> Everything is snappy and wonderful again [even with KDE + lots of lovely
> anti-aliased glyphs to shuttle about the network].
> 
> [ Aside: One thing I think Xouvert could /really/ do with doing is
> packaging X for Win32 in a nice installer like NoMachines do. Cygwin is
> OK but brings in a lot of cruft with it. For people who just want to run
> an X-server on a Win32 box to access a remote *nix machine its overkill.
> Especially if you have a 50Mb homedir limit :) - A quick Win32 GUI
> frontend to the command-line options of XFree86/Win32 would be good ]
> 
> Conclusions: Again, totally unscientific but from a quick poke about
> with Task Manager, NX's ssh and proxy use a fair whack of CPU time to do
> the stream compression and pixmap re-encoding. For thin-clients (which
> is mostly what I view these boxen in the common-room as) this places so
> much demand on the CPU there isn't enough time to actually make the
> X-server responsive(!). I think I agree with Keith P here that a simple
> stream compression via ssh -X -C seems to hit a happy medium for
> moderate bandwidth connections, even on my girlfriend's 500k cable
> connection mozilla is still completely usable with stream-compressed X.
> 
> Of course NX is a /lot/ better on sensibly-powered machines over low
> bandwidth but how many people run X over dialups anymore?