Re: Speeding up remote GUI apps - colour depth or other ideas?
Re: Speeding up remote GUI apps - colour depth or other ideas?
- Subject: Re: Speeding up remote GUI apps - colour depth or other ideas?
- From: Grant Jacobs <email@hidden>
- Date: Sat, 20 Oct 2007 18:48:32 +1300
Title: Re: Speeding up remote GUI apps - colour depth or
other id
Thanks for everyone's suggestions.
The reason I've come down this route is the VNC viewer or server
would freeze after a few minutes use, so I thought to try run the X11
GUI applications "directly".
By luck I left the viewer open and while moving files from the
Desktop to folders using the command-line and noticed that the
vncviewer updated the screen to indicate that they'd been moved. So, I
concluded that most likely what was happening was that the
viewer/server was giving up on mouse events somehow, rather than
freezing outright.
(Any comments on that are welcome.)
I'm trying vncviewer -x11cursor in the hope that this might help
(so far, good). Passing vncviewer 'grabKeyboard: true' also might be
worth a try.
VNC does work well when it does, although the fonts are
tiny!
I will look into NX or LBX when I have time as I rather like the
idea of running the application "directly" on the Apple
Desktop.
Chris -- I like nEdit too, but I use TextWrangler's (or BBEdit's)
ftp mode which is fine as long as the files aren't huge.
Grant
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
--
--------------------------------------------------------
Grant
Jacobs
email@hidden
Dunedin, ph. +64 3 478
0095
NEW
ZEALAND. fax. +64 3 470 0095
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