Re: Speeding up remote GUI apps - colour depth or other ideas?

Subject: Re: Speeding up remote GUI apps - colour depth or other ideas?
From: "Chris Linstid" <email@hidden>
Date: Fri, 19 Oct 2007 11:47:15 -0400
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I have generally found two solutions for this:

1. VNC - Run a vncserver on the host computer that's running the X11 apps and the viewer on the client system. I do software development on a Linux server running at work while displaying on my Mac via X11. In lower bandwidth situations, VNC makes that much more tolerable.

2. LBX - Low Bandwidth X11 - http://tldp.org/HOWTO/LBX.html
Basically the idea behind LBX is that X11 applications send and receive a large amount of meaningless event information and that causes issues on low-bandwidth network connections. These events are sent regardless of color-depth and that is probably why changing your color depth hasn't made any difference. LBX strips out the unnecessary events and thus lowers the bandwidth requirements.

Setup for LBX is a bit more difficult than a VNC server, but allows you to run your X11 applications side-by-side with your regular applications.

In the end, the biggest change I made was going from using NEdit as my editor to vim. That reduced my bandwidth requirements by a TON. :)

Hope this helps and good luck.

- Chris

On 10/18/07, Grant Jacobs <email@hidden > wrote:

Hi,

I've been trying, very unsuccessfully, to speed up access to GUI apps
over X11 over VPN via the local broadband (which isn't that great).
My current attempts are based around trying to persuade X to use a
shallower colour depth, figuring that will reduce network traffic (?).

I've tried altering the X11.app colour depth preferences (in
Preferences>Ouput) & restarting X11 to make them active and also via
using defaults write com.apple.x11 15 (which I presume is essentially
the same thing). Neither seems to make any difference--the apps still
open painfully slowly on the local machine regardless of what I do
and always seem to show the full colour depth AFAICT by eye
regardless of the colur depth setting.

I'd welcome any suggestions.

Grant
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