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X11 Chrome Reportedly Outperforms Windows and Mac Versions
An anonymous reader writes "In a curious contrast to conventional wisdom, there are reports of X11 Chromium being faster than Windows or Mac versions. In the thread titled 'Why is Linux Chrome so fast?,' a developer speculates that it is due to the use of X11 capabilities: 'On X-windows [sic], the renderer backingstores are managed by the X server, and the transport DIBs are also managed by the X server. So, we avoid a lot of memcpy costs incurred on Windows due to keeping the backingstores in main memory there.' Has the design of X11 withstood the test of time better than people tend to give it credit for?"
Does anybody know if it's possible to compile a version of Chromium for X11 Mac?
Uh. Maybe you don't understand what I am saying....
I KNOW that MacOS 10 is OS X.
I'm asking if anybody has compiled a version of Chromium to use X11 instead of using Cocoa.
So in other words, those who programmed on X when X was the only big player are now older where you lose hair and sexual virility.
Colour me surprised.
Meanwhile X is still working better than Mac or Windows as a GUI framework.
Thing I don't get is why so many guys have a hard-on for dissing X.
Why?
I'm pretty sure that the biggest slowdown for Chrome isn't the memcpy/bitblitting for the display - it's probably something to do with the insanely big history files it generates as part of it's searchable history.
Files you can't limit in size, can't compress, can't optimise. Instead all you can do is to delete them and loose all your precious history information.
It also has the bonus of providing a searchable address bar that performs significantly worse than firefox's searchable address bar !
I use both firefox and chrome simultaneously at home and at work, dedicated each browser for different tasks I do. It's a real shame that Chrome is being seriously degraded over time by this fault - I've started switching back to firefox because of it as my laptop just struggles too much with it now...
X11 is not bloated nor slow, GTK is both. Put 100 or so spinedits on one form in Win32 and in GTK. On netbook or anything other than quadcore machine, you will see significant difference in speed. And it is not because of the graphics. Sometimes I think GTK render fractals somewhere just to keep processor busy. Meanwhile, when I draw 100 spinedits using only cairo, it is almost as fast as Win32 while giving the same output as GTK including shadows, gradients, etc... I've being noticing this GTK behavior since forever.
GTK folks, please fix it.
X11 has never been a bottleneck in performance on the desktop. Many people have been confusing X11 with the desktop system/kernel/applications and wrongly blamed X11 for any slowness.
Yes, exactly. X11 ran reasonably complicated applications 20 years ago on hardware that we throw out as woefully inadequate (or quaintly archaic) today, and did so with entirely acceptable speed. X11 isn't the problem -- hardware is what, two orders of magnitude faster now? -- it's all of the poor programming practices that have layer upon layer of abstraction and interpretation stacked tall and high.
I had a 266 MHz laptop in the mid 1990s (about 15 years ago) that ran Linux (RedHat 6.2, mostly) and X11 perfectly well with a mere 64 MB of main memory. A while ago, I tried to load a Fedora release (9, if I recall correctly) on it. "Laughable" is a good term to describe the result. My current laptop has a 10x faster processor and 50x more memory. There's more cache on the processor in my new laptop than total system memory on the old one --- And yet, Fedora 11 feels sluggish on the new hardware. X11 is not the problem.
Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.
"I also know that graphic displays and inputs are vastly different today than they were 10 and 20 years ago."
Really what is so different other than the number of pixels on the display?
"I suspect that X11 wasn't developed initially with today's needs in mind."
Then perhaps you should read about the original goals of the X window system.
"For whatever reason, Linux drivers have NEVER taken advantage of this, and that is why Linux often looks clunky compared to Windows on the same hardware."
This is just BLATANTLY WRONG.
All you need to do is read the feature announcements for the nVidia and ATI display drivers, which you apparently DON'T DO.
nVidia's REAL target market is the folks who work at animation companies, and the hard-core data visualization people. Their products are designed to fly in THIS environment. This market is VERY HEAVILY tilted toward Unix. That is WHY you can get such EXCELLENT display support under Linux. The rest of us are just piggybacking off of this.
I've never had performance issues running X11 over a LAN. VNC, on the other hand, is noticeably sluggish (RDP seems to work well though). I don't run apps over a WAN very often, except for the occasional emacs session (which is a bit laggy but useable).
But more importantly, the X style of remote access is much, much more useful than VNC/RDP. Remote apps integrate seamlessly into my desktop, instead of being stuck in a separate window. And multiple people can run remote apps on the same machine, without interfering with each other or a user who's physically sitting at the machine.
VNC and RDP are useful hacks for systems that weren't designed for remote access, but they're no replacement for real network transparency.
X itself is undergoing incredible levels of development and improvement. Way back when, "The Open Group" tried to say that X was "complete" with X11R6, and no more development was needed, though somehow defects and omissions let numbers start creeping in after the decimal point. IIRC it got to somewhere in the X11R6.3-X11R6.5 range. Then XFree86 took over, ramping up some innovation, though still slower than many liked. After that X.Org took over, decided it was high time for X11R7, (They did X11R6.9 as a stage to get there.) and things started moving faster.
At this point, they're redrawing the lines (KMS, DRI/DRI2, DRM) between kernel and user space to (hopefully) get a better balance speed and stability/security. They've pretty much reworked the 2D acceleration (*XA) and are reworking the 3D acceleration (Gallium3D) which will also simplify driver development. The inteface has been reworked down near the protocol level (xcb) to improve speed and memory usage. One thing I've heard talk of is "inverting" the stack to put all primitives on top of the 3D hardware, since that's where most of the hardware performance work has been done.
The next 6-12 months will be very interesting for X-Windows, but then again, the past few years have been interesting, too.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.