Re: What are the issues with X11 in OS X Mavericks?
Re: What are the issues with X11 in OS X Mavericks?
- Subject: Re: What are the issues with X11 in OS X Mavericks?
- From: Merton Campbell Crockett <email@hidden>
- Date: Thu, 24 Oct 2013 15:52:31 -0700
On Oct 24, 2013, at 12:20 , Jeremy Huddleston Sequoia <email@hidden> wrote:
>> On 24 Oct 2013, at 19:13, Merton Campbell Crockett wrote:
>>
>>> This morning I tried running Wireshark again. Instead of aborting Wireshark when it failed to start within a minute, I left it “running” and went on to other things. After about 5 minutes, the Wireshark splash screen appeared followed by its normal startup window. Since then, Wireshark starts much more quickly than it ever did under earlier OS X releases.
>>
>> The first time you run an X11 program that uses fontconfig, all fonts in the system are scanned and some kind of database or cache is created (and that can take several minutes). Maybe that's what happened?
>
> XQuartz's font cache is generated during the postinstall script phase (that's why it takes a long time with that install phase).
>
> But you're probably close to the issue. wireshark has its own version of fontconfig, and I thought it used to show a caching progress bar while it was generating the font caches (on first execution), but maybe it wasn't shown for some reason.
There is a progress bar on Wireshark’s “splash screen” as it initializes that is followed by the Wireshark’s “start screen” where you select the interface that you want to monitor and configure any filters that you need. The issue that I saw was the extraordinarily long delay between the “sudo wireshark” and the “splash screen” being displayed the first time that it was executed. After the first execution of Wireshark, Wireshark’s “splash screen” is displayed much more quickly than it did on any earlier release of OS X.
What I surmise, and it is a supposition, is that Apple is constructing a compressed image of the application and writing it out to disk. If your goal is to improve system performance by compressing inactive applications, your have to address the problem of swapping inactive applications to disk. For a “standard” OS X application, it would be easy to provide a compressed memory image of the application in the update distribution. Apple couldn’t do this for the X-window environment as X11 is no longer distributed with OS X.
A second part of the problem is: “Which X-windows applications should be pre-compressed and included in the distribution?” My interest in networking tools is unlikely to coincide with others interests.
--
Merton Campbell Crockett
e-mail: email@hidden
mobile: 1(805)377-6762
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