Re: X Mosaic update, and question.
Thomas A. Fine (fine@cis.ohio-state.edu)
Thu, 11 Feb 93 12:13:22 -0500
>Just an X Mosaic update, and a question...
>
>Update: 0.7 is almost ready to go; some more stress testing and we'll
>ship. A list of things that have changed follows.
>
>Question: X Mosaic is starting to get big. And it's probably starting
>to slow down a little, due to a lot of the housekeeping things needed
>to support the more advanced functionality, user interface components,
>and so on. We're basically developing with fast RISC boxes in mind as
>the platform for running Mosaic, but we realize that many sites (in
>particular, those with large numbers of machines and in
>non-development environments) don't have that much power for their
>user base. At what point will we start making X Mosaic unusable for
>people with less-powerful systems? In particular, what kinds of
>features, and GUI toys, are particularly expendable for performance
>reasons? And how concerned should we be about this anyway?
We're mostly a bunch of 8 Meg, 12 Mips Monochrome Sun SLCs with no
local swap. With 0.6, we get a big start-up wait (about 15 seconds),
but after that response is acceptable. Also, I noticed that if you
don't strip the binary, it's roughly 2.5Meg. If you do strip it, its
about 1.5Meg. Unstripped, its bigger then an unstripped emacs;
stripped its smaller than a stripped emacs. Imagine if someone
implemented a Motif version of emacs... Speaking of which, you
_are_ well under the size of FrameMaker (3.1 Meg stripped).
It's hard for me to say what things could be dropped. Everything is
just so cool. Perhaps if you could try to figure out which things take
up all the space?
Also, could you please have it die with SIGINT?
tom