*BSD News Article 7824


Return to BSD News archive

Path: sserve!manuel.anu.edu.au!munnari.oz.au!spool.mu.edu!agate!doc.ic.ac.uk!kd
From: kd@doc.ic.ac.uk (Kostis Dryllerakis)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd
Subject: [XFree86]: Performance Problems
Date: 17 Nov 1992 10:27:07 GMT
Organization: Imperial College, London, U.K.
Lines: 33
Distribution: world
Message-ID: <1eahdrINNpt1@frigate.doc.ic.ac.uk>
NNTP-Posting-Host: laotzu.doc.ic.ac.uk
Keywords: XFree86 X11 X-windows X386


This article is about a subject I haven't seen much discussed in the newsgroup.
For introduction I give the host configuration of my machine being a 486DX50 ISA
system with 8MB Adaptec 1542B and Fujitsu 1.05GB SCSI drive. I had 386BSD up and 
running without any major problems with full sources for Unix and XFree86. Without
the X-windows system the performance of the system is outstanding (e.g. full 
recompilation of the Kernel in less than 7mins). Since the system runs standalone for
the time being there is no network overhead or additional deamons running. Under
X-windows things start to behave a little differently performance-wise. I know that
the memory requirements of all X clients are huge since they keep a copy of the
X library in use but I would expect that and X server and two xterms will not be
a problem. It seems that if under this 'running' configuration and a couple bash
shells to allow for su, I do any compilation of a large program (specially if
the program is an X-client) the system becomes unusable. What is more the X386 server
seems to grow on size during usage, from a virtual memory size of 1.9MB to 3.5MB after
a while (values taken for ps -aux). The swap space provided on the disk is about
48MB (to avoid reconfguration after memory upgrade) so the situation seems unfare.

Has anybody else had any similar experiences with XFree86? Is it just a memory problem
or is there something more to it? If it is a memory problem then the shared libraries
will contribute towards a solution. But what are we supposed to do for the time being?

Kostis

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
K J Dryllerakis					Deparment    of    Computing
Logic Programming Group				Imperial  College,    LONDON
Janet: kd @uk.ac.ic.doc				Tel:  +44(71) 589 5111 x5089
Uucp : kd@icdoc.UUCP				Internet:    kd@doc.ic.ac.uk
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------