How to get apps to work on remote X displays?

[Grant Edwards]

On 2007-05-15, Ken Moffat <kmoffat at drizzle.com> wrote:

>>>> AFAICT, the GTK authors expect to be able to do millions of
>>>> round-trips to the server everytime anything happens (no matter
>>>> how trivial).  If you've got a link with a latency of more than
>>>> a few hundred microseconds, you're screwed.
>>>>       
>>> Yeah, this has sadly been my experience as well.  Even on a
>>> LAN I've seen very poor performance with gtk apps.
>>>
>>> One possibility is to try downgrading to gtk 2.6 (if that's
>>> possible for you), and see if that helps. 2.6 is pre-cairo,
>>> which may (or may not) halp matters a bit.
>>
>> I'm currently running 2.6.3.3.
>>
>> I don't often need to run X apps remotely -- it's just sad to
>> know that you can no longer do it.  It was always one of the
>> things that one could point to as an advantage of X11 over
>> MS-Windows.
>
> Odd, I have a fresh install of ubuntu 7.04 on my laptop, and am 
> wirelessly connected through a linksys router, and thunar runs well 
> using ssh. I'm connecting to an old athlon server here on a local network.

The latencies through a LAN are usually small enough that it
doesn't cause noticable problems.  Try it through a connection
with 50ms latencies, and it'll fail miserably.  I tried running
Evolution through a 1MbDSL link once.  It took almost a
half-hour to start.  Needless to say, it was completely
unusable (a conclusion one can safely reach after a few minutes
waiting for the initial window to be drawn, but I but was
curious to find out how bad Gnome really was).

You used to be able to run X apps through WAN (or even dial-up)
connections.  Back in the day, I did a lot of development on
SGI workstations through a 14.4K dial-up ppp connection by
running X apps on the SGI boxes with the DISPLAY variable
pointing them to my Linux machine at my end of the phone line.

-- 
Grant Edwards                   grante             Yow!  I am covered with
                                  at               pure vegetable oil and I am
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