[Sunhelp] X Window System

[James Lockwood]

On Mon, 22 Nov 1999, Wes Hofmann wrote:

> Well I'm running this on Solaris 2.6 and I've beenn told that I would get a
> noticeably smaller memory footprint and improved performance if I got rid of
> OpenWindows and installed a different X Server.  Is this incorrect?

For Solaris versions before 2.4 (including SunOS 4.*) this is correct.
Sun's X server was considerably slower in some areas but had increased
functionality that sometimes made it worthwhile to use.

Modern Solaris X servers are enhanced versions of the publically available
X sources.  They should run at comparable speeds.

Note that you will see a huge improvement if you get rid of CDE.  Ditch
all of it (including dtlogin) and performance on older systems will be
greatly increased.

There is an X speedup FAQ floating around, you might want to try to track
it down.  Many of the ideas there were basic (don't enable opaque window
moves, don't use background images, etc) but some people still don't do
them.  Running a lean window manager and avoiding some of the bloated UI
toolkits (Motif, GTK, QT) will help considerably.  If you need
applications that depend on them, try to stick to only one toolkit for
memory reasons (only one copy needs to be loaded into memory no matter how
many programs are using it). 

Are you limited in memory or CPU?  They respond best to different
solutions.

-James