X protocol chattiness is the problem not bandwidth
on
Low-Bandwidth X
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· Score: 2
Around 5 years ago I was involved with some people who were trying to determine why their X application was taking 5 to 20 minutes to start up when run across the WAN.
We put some protocol analyzers on it to see what was going on. It turns out that X is extremely chatty. This particular application made over a 1000 round trips between the client and server during start up. When running on a LAN where latency is a milisecond or less this is not a problem, but when running across 15 hops with a latency of around 300ms the chattiness blows up in your face.
If the latency is low, X's bandwidth requirements are very modest. I used to run an X terminal on a 14.4Kbs modem to telecommute and while it was a bit slow it was usable.
To make X a WAN friendly protocol someone needs to address this chattiness issue.
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Around 5 years ago I was involved with some people who were trying to determine why their X application was taking 5 to 20 minutes to start up when run across the WAN.
We put some protocol analyzers on it to see what was going on. It turns out that X is extremely chatty. This particular application made over a 1000 round trips between the client and server during start up. When running on a LAN where latency is a milisecond or less this is not a problem, but when running across 15 hops with a latency of around 300ms the chattiness blows up in your face.
If the latency is low, X's bandwidth requirements are very modest. I used to run an X terminal on a 14.4Kbs modem to telecommute and while it was a bit slow it was usable.
To make X a WAN friendly protocol someone needs to address this chattiness issue.
David