X Window System performance on Iris

[Joe Garbarino]

Mark Callow of SGI writes:
> On present SGI hardware XOR performance is at best adequate.  We therefore
> recommend you run our window manager which does rubberbanding in the overlay
> planes (it's written in PostScript, but that's another story) rather
> than something like uwm which uses xor all over the place.

I replied:
@ Until this XOR/window manager problem is solved, a major piece of SGI's X
@ Window System implementation is severely inadequate, and I will not be
@ satisfied with its performance.

Mark again:
> I said the performance was "adequate".  How you translate that to "severely
> inadequate" without even having seen it is beyond me.  uwm is usable.

"at best adequate" says to me that while it may be adequate in some
respects, it is mostly inadequate.  If you can follow the drawing of the
outlines of the windows as they are being moved/resized with
awm/twm/uwm, as you can in the current implementation, this is indeed
severely inadequate.  Movement/resizing of the windows is one of the
more important functions of the window manager; making it a very slow
function actually makes that window manager unuseable.

					Joe Garbarino
					ERIM
					P.O. Box 8618
					Ann Arbor, Mi.  48107
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					jgarb at csd360b.erim.org