From: suqroch@susssys1.reading.ac.uk (Mike Roch)
Newsgroups: comp.windows.x,comp.windows.open-look
Subject: Re: Performance Impact of Different X's (Summary)
Summary: What is the optimum config of X server/wm on SS1
Keywords: X,open-look, Sun Sparc
Date: 5 Oct 92 16:16:10 GMT
Organization: University of Reading

I posted the following question to comp.windows.x and comp.windows.open-look 

: Does anyone have any information (preferably quantitative) about the 
: relative impact on the performance of Sun Sparc 1s (16MB memory)
: of MIT X with (say) twm, Motif with mwm and Open-Look with olwm.
: 
: Which will allow the greatest number of (adequately performing) X-clients/
: X-terminals.

Here are the replies I got:
============================================================================
1. From: Tony Hart <hart%com.hp.waterloo@uk.co.hewlett-packard.hpl>
 
I'm afraid I have no hard figures, but I can offer some guidelines.
 
For modern RISC-based hosts, with adequate CPU power, your main bottleneck
is host RAM. Ideally, you should have sufficient memory to hold each user's
tasks without having to do much disk swapping. If you are short of CPU 
horsepower, you will want to use a window manager without "bells and whistles".
'Twm' probably best fits the bill on both counts. It is probably 1/3 the
size of 'mwm' (don't know about 'olwm') and is considerably simpler.
 
If you are using X terminals which support local window managers, you can
shift the memory and CPU load from host to the terminal itself. In this case,
there may be not be much difference between local 'twm' and local 'mwm', as
far as the host is concerned.
 
You may find that you'll need more than 16 MB of host memory to adequately 
handle two or more users. Based on performance testing with HP 700/RX X t
terminals, for "light" applications (e.g. Informix Wingz), we would recommend
at least 20 MB / 11 MIPS to support two users. For three users, we'd recommend
at least 24 MB / 14 MIPS. These figures are for HP Series 700 computers
running HP-UX but they should be roughly the same for Sun SPARC machines.
========================================================================= 
2. From: kenichi@com.cray.ladem2 (Ken J. Taylor - Huntington Beach)
 
I went through this exercise a while back.  Mwm and olwm are slower
than twm.  I chose olwm and OpenWindows DeskSet programs - and I am
still using Sun3/50 with 4 MBytes of memory - because functionality,
consistancy, and pleasure of use is so much better than mwm and twm.  I
feel like more productivity is better because of better design of OPEN
LOOK products.  Twm gets its speed by doing less: the users end up doing
lot of the window management work with it.
==================================================================
3. From: sinan@com.boeing.Mtesol (Sinan Karasu)

All three will work equally well as window managers. As long as you run 
olwm without xnews. It is the xnews that uses all the memory and performance, 
NOT olwm. Actually you should try olvwm. olvwm is what we use with
PCs and Hummingbird exceed.We  use olwm on Concurrent 7000s
without xnews and it works just as fast as any other window manager.
Sinan
=================================================================
4. From: lee@com.sq (Liam Quin)
 
I don't have numbers, I'm afraid. Mwm and OSF/Motif applications tend
to be noticeably slower than OPEN LOOK UI products at user interface
stuff, for some reason.
 
If you run the window manager locally, you will get a big gain; most X
terminals can do this.
 
We generally use olvwm or olwm round here, and it seems to work fine.
There are slightly fewer window decorations than with twm (by default), but
it doesn't make a huge difference.  The olgx drawing olwm uses is fairly
fast, since it uses a special font to do it instead of X drawing calls,
e.g. for buttons.
 
If you are calling a SPARCStation 1 a terminal, you can use OpenWindows 3
and run the NeWS terminal emulator (jet) instead of xterm, and that will
save scads of memory.
 
If you use a lot of Sun deskset clients, though, use cmdtool or shelltool,
as this shares a lot of libraries with the other XView-based deskset programs,
and you use less memory on the host - but not necessarily on the terminal!
==========================================================================
5. From: Jonny Farringdon <ucjtrjf@uk.ac.ucl>
 
IPC running openwindows + olwm        SLC running XSun + vtwm OR olwm
IPC  17.8Mips                         SLC 12.0   66% speed of IPC
Both 8Mb ram
 
SUBJECTIVE assesment of performance.
~~~~~~~~~~
IPC's performancs *crap*  with 3 cmdtools, mailtool, clock, and filemgr.
SLC's good, with 10, even 20 xterms, xmailtool, xclock, xmeter.
 
XSun seems to be better than xnews, but then you loose the NEWS facility.
with > 3Mb of XView librarys to load in, it's no wonder a few xview apps
start a machine thrashing the disk.
 
Doesn't stop you using the olwm though.  ;-)

XSun is what you end up with if you build the X distribution from MIT.  There
are a numbner of X-Binary sites for sparcs, and not having a spare 100Meg or
so, i get mine form one of these, see following. In all the X binarys, libs
and include files take about 30Meg.
 
You CAN run the olwm -- but to get Sunview compatibility you'll need to run
the seperate progs that open win runs anyway. Also clearly you wnt get NEWS,
but then try and find somebody who knows what it is, or uses it  ;-)
 
For running xView things, you'll need extra librarys. To compile xview things
you'll need lotts of extra things, .h files &c.
 
We're running ``vanilla'' X because of speed ..  have a look at the size of
xview progs, AND consider the library sizes .. below
 
----/usr/lib   X things-------------
 544 -rw-r--r--  1 jonny      542060 Jul 17 17:27 libX11.a
 456 -rw-r--r--  1 jonny      458752 Mar 26  1992 libX11.so.4.10
   7 -rw-r--r--  1 jonny        6664 Mar 26  1992 libXau.a
   9 -rw-r--r--  1 jonny        9168 Mar 26  1992 libXaw.sa.5.0
 248 -rw-r--r--  1 jonny      245760 Mar 26  1992 libXaw.so.5.0
  12 -rw-r--r--  1 jonny       11876 Mar 26  1992 libXdmcp.a
  30 -rw-r--r--  1 jonny       30362 Jul 17 17:26 libXext.a
  40 -rw-r--r--  1 jonny       40960 Mar 26  1992 libXext.so.4.10
  48 -rw-r--r--  1 jonny       49152 Mar 26  1992 libXi.so.4.10
   3 -rw-r--r--  1 jonny        2202 Mar 26  1992 libXmu.sa.4.10
  88 -rw-r--r--  1 jonny       90112 Mar 26  1992 libXmu.so.4.10
   6 -rw-r--r--  1 jonny        5230 Mar 26  1992 libXt.sa.4.10
 296 -rw-r--r--  1 jonny      294912 Mar 26  1992 libXt.so.4.10
 
------XVIEW  openlook libs
  32 -rw-r--r--  1 jonny       32768 Sep 17 17:14 libdeskset.so.0.0
  24 -rw-r--r--  1 jonny       24576 Mar 26  1992 liboldX.so.4.10
  56 -rw-r--r--  1 jonny       57344 Sep 17 17:12 libolgx.so.3.0
 800 -rw-r--r--  1 jonny      804090 Mar 26  1992 libphigs.a
1352 -rw-r--r--  1 jonny     1372750 Sep 17 17:02 libxview.a
  19 -rw-r--r--  1 jonny       19402 Sep 17 17:02 libxview.sa.3.0
1048 -rw-r--r--  1 jonny     1064960 Sep 17 17:06 libxview.so.3.0
1512 -rw-r--r--  1 jonny     1532454 Sep 17 17:11 libxview_p.a
 
 
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
 
Then again, we LIKE the xmailtool, and positively dislike the open look
mailtool. Just *HATE* it when a mailtool controlls what mail-headers you can
have ;-(  Allmost all out usefull apps are NOT openlook, but we can't realy
afford to have two machine (soon to be 3) thrashing our one disk due to
swaping.
 
we use  xmeter  xfig  xterm (MUCH more usefull than cmdtool, =vt100 em)
various xclocks, &c  However i might quite soon switch to the olvwm.
 
So rather than run
----openwin----
openwindows
.openwin-apps
xinit
.xinitrc
xnews
*  5 other progs to get sunview compatibility
olwm   {which is NOT fully X complient, and doesn't handle non-rectangular
        windows at all well, unlike the vtwm which does}
---------------
 
---XSun------
xinit
.xinitrc
X -> XSun
vtwm   OR  ol[v]wm
------------
 
I'm told by the guy who does the FAQ for the open-look news group, that  xnews
for OW3  is about as fast at X11R4's XSun.  But then we run X11R5  ;-)
 
 
Our new machine is coming with the new OS, so we'll get the OW dist, and
everything we'll need to make xview applications if we like.   BUT we are sure
NOT going to run xnews, but rather XSun, short-circuiting those other openwin
progs, so basically the same setup as now, with xview progs available, but not
used as default.
 
here's my info on X-sparc binary-sites ...
 
the global X ftp archieve at export.lcs.mit.edu (18.24.0.12)
AND ARCHIE HAS EVERY X-APPLICATION YOU'LL NEED
 
Request:   X11R5  binarys for   Sun Sparc   SunOS 4.1
        set up in a *sensible* way (directory structure).
        Needed beacuse we don't have the disk space to
        unpack the distribution, &c.
 
Responce:
      	. Bill Bailey <dbgwab@arco.com> Voice : (214) 754-6779
          Very helpfull, (seemingly) offering src ^/V bins
 
	. isis.dccs.upenn.edu  [128.16.8.25]  X11R5 patchlevel 9
          in  pub/X11R5.   Tahnks to Hal Pomeranz. Cut up into a
          few too many pieces for me (cant get mget to be automatic!)
 
      	. X11R5 for sparc 4.1.1  compressed tar over 23 meg,
          offered is i couldn't find one closer to home, by David,
          dlukas@cns.bu.edu
 
	. Suggestion of  Bob Bruce's GNU/X11R5 CD-ROM. Check
          alt.cd-rom for details  rather than (info from)
          Thomas (thomas@duteca.et.tudelft.nl
 
	. ra.nrl.navy.mil [128.16.8.25]   x11r5 p9 (?)
          One *big* (11Meg)  tar.Z file. /bin /include
          /lib /man   This is the one I got, just because`
          it came in one lump.  Thanks to  chas, chas@curie.nrl.navy.mil.
 
	. Yutaka Kataoka kataoka@ohara.info.waseda.ac.jp, sen me info
          on  X11R5 + multilingual clients binary, archived.
          I was allready set up when i recieved this, but then
          it looked a little big for me at 50Meg unpacked


===================================================================
Mike Roch, Computer Services Centre,           M.Roch@reading.ac.uk
University of Reading,                             Tel: 0734 318430
Whiteknights, Reading, RG6 2AX.                    Fax: 0734 753094

-- 
===================================================================
Mike Roch, Computer Services Centre,           M.Roch@reading.ac.uk
University of Reading,                             Tel: 0734 318430
Whiteknights, Reading, RG6 2AX.                    Fax: 0734 753094
Newsgroups: comp.windows.x