X11R4 for i386 Unix

[Piercarlo Grandi]

In article <1990Jul03.222233.1896 at virtech.uucp> cpcahil at virtech.uucp (Conor P. Cahill) writes:

   The difference is "requires to work" as opposed to "requires for usefulness".
   X11R3 on any 386 system with less than 8MB will force the different processes
   to be swaped out.  I ran one in this configuration with only 3 xterms, an
   xbiff, and an xclock.  You could hear the disk fumbling around when I moved
   the mouse from window to window.

This si again the result of poor swapper/page design. I cannot believe
that the combined working sets of your processes was larger than 2-3
megabytes. Hey, I cannot believe that the *total* size of your
applications was larger than that, even if xclock is rumoured to grow to
1.3 megs of address space...

On my sun3 I have 2 xterms and 1 xclock, and two remote windows, and
sizes are:

		SIZE	RSS

	X	952	248
	xclock	152	0
	xinit	56	0
	xterm	208	96
	tcsh	104	80
	uwm	120	32
	xterm	216	112
	tcsh	104	104

	TOTALS  1912	672

i.e. well below two megs and a tad over half, and even given the great
imprecision of such measurements, we are way below eight megs. The only
explanation as usual is the catastrophic performance of the System V
(and, incidentally SunOS, Ultirx, etc...) swapper (yes, on my 4 meg sun3
I get some swapping as well, as you see form the above 0 RSS
entries...).

Note that my X server is that big also because I have a large background
bitmap.
--
Piercarlo "Peter" Grandi           | ARPA: pcg%cs.aber.ac.uk at nsfnet-relay.ac.uk
Dept of CS, UCW Aberystwyth        | UUCP: ...!mcsun!ukc!aber-cs!pcg
Penglais, Aberystwyth SY23 3BZ, UK | INET: pcg at cs.aber.ac.uk