[Gllug] Transparent Terminal

[Nix]

On Wed, 8 Dec 2004, Daniel P. Berrange stipulated:
>                              Curious as to the reasons, I ran OProfile
> against both XTerm and Gnome Terminal, and discovered that by far the
> largest bottleneck was in the client side font rendering library. I

You sure? I'd expect the delay to be because that library makes use
of the render extension on the server, and the server's render extension
implementation isn't accelerated anywhere yet (except for MGA cards).

> guess its just the price you pay for anti-aliased fonts - at least
> until they're nicely integrated in the X server itself.

They *are* nicely integrated; client-side fonts with antialiasing on
that side, and Render-extension-assisted GlyphSet transfer to the server
is a particularly elegant way of doing anti-aliasing, and I for one
think it unlikely that they'll move back in the core fonts direction for
some time, if ever --- not least because in other benchmarks core fonts
come out *slower* than client-side fonts, particularly if the core font
in question has a large set of glyphs inside it (Unicode fonts, kanji
fonts...)

Oh, another oddity in your results: rxvt doesn't have Xft support, but
xterm *does* (although it is turned off by default), so if rxvt is slow
(which in my experience it isn't) then that can't be the cause.

-- 
`The sword we forged has turned upon us
 Only now, at the end of all things do we see
 The lamp-bearer dies; only the lamp burns on.'
-- 
Gllug mailing list  -  Gllug at gllug.org.uk
http://lists.gllug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/gllug