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From: j@narcisa.sax.de (J Wunsch)
Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.questions
Subject: Re: Web browers for FreeBSD
Date: 13 Mar 1995 10:57:41 +0100
Organization: Private U**x site, Dresden.
Lines: 33
Message-ID: <3k14ul$e6l@bonnie.tcd-dresden.de>
References: <D53JD4.Dtn@trwind.TRW.COM> <3jkuil$q21@news0.cybernetics.net>
Reply-To: joerg_wunsch@uriah.heep.sax.de
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James Robinson <james@hermes.cybernetics.net> wrote:
>[screen freezes when starting up netscape]
>
>I'll bet you're using the huge font on a relatively slow machine without a
>font server. ...
>You may want to try running a fontserver -- a seperate process that
>handles fonts. If I understand things correctly, the fontserver process will
>do all of the hard scaling, leaving your server free to process other events.
>Anyone do this currently?
I started doing so back in the days when i ran XFree86 on an 386sx/16,
just for the same reason. (Except that _any_ font request caused a
temporary server freeze there. :-) Especially when using Type1 fonts,
the font rendering will take some CPU. Further it's more convenient
in a LAN to have the fonts managed centrally (preferrably on a machine
with a fast CPU:).
Unfortunately, the xfs provided with stock X11R6 is rather flakey. It
used to fall into an endless loop if some (silly) client queried for
all fonts but told the server to respond with at most 0 fonts. ;-) It
also dumped core from time to time... The latest X Consortium public
fixes (as included into XFree86 [tm] 3.1.1) are said to have fixed
some of the problems.
Poor man's multi-threading... 8^)
--
cheers, J"org private: joerg_wunsch@uriah.heep.sax.de
http://www.sax.de/~joerg/
Never trust an operating system you don't have sources for. ;-)