Xfree86/cygwin and speed

Xfree86/cygwin and speed

[cforelle2]

Hello all,

I've got a question about speeding up application performance when using Xfree86 and Cygwin. Here's my configuration:

Linux box connected by 100 Mbps Ethernet to router.
Windows machine connecting wirelessly at 11 Mbps (802.11b) to router.

Cygwin with Xfree86 set up on Windows machine, X11 forwarding set up on Linux box. I connect from Windows machine to Linux box with Cygwin using ssh tunnelling. I can successfully run the Linux application remotely. All is pretty good.

Trouble is, the application is The GIMP, and it is painfully slow on the Windows machine. Redrawing the image occurs in slow motion, and every time I move a dialog box, I've got to wait an eternity for the image to fill in. 

Here's my question: How can I speed this up? Or, rather, where's the bottleneck?

-Is it the cygwin dll emulation, in which case I suppose there isn't anything to do?

-Is it the 11Mbps wireless connection, in which case I'll think more deeply about shelling out for 802.11g equipment?

-Is the Linux machine too slow? (It runs GIMP locally just fine.)

-Is the Windows machine too slow? (It should be fast enough to run the GIMP just fine.)

-Is it the fact that traffic is slowed down by encryption over the ssh tunnel?

-Is there something else I can do, config wise, to try to liven things up?

Any insight would be most appreciated.

Thanks and regards,

Charles.

Re: Xfree86/cygwin and speed

[Alexander Gottwald]

On Fri, 9 Jan 2004 cforelle2@comcast.net wrote:

> Hello all,
> 
> I've got a question about speeding up application performance when using Xfree86 and Cygwin. Here's my configuration:
> 
> Linux box connected by 100 Mbps Ethernet to router.
> Windows machine connecting wirelessly at 11 Mbps (802.11b) to router.
> 
> Cygwin with Xfree86 set up on Windows machine, X11 forwarding set up on Linux box. I connect from Windows machine to Linux box with Cygwin using ssh tunnelling. I can successfully run the Linux application remotely. All is pretty good.
> 
> Trouble is, the application is The GIMP, and it is painfully slow on the Windows machine. Redrawing the image occurs in slow motion, and every time I move a dialog box, I've got to wait an eternity for the image to fill in. 
> 
> Here's my question: How can I speed this up? Or, rather, where's the bottleneck?
> 
> -Is it the 11Mbps wireless connection, in which case I'll think more deeply about shelling out for 802.11g equipment?
> 
> Any insight would be most appreciated.

It is mainly the slow wireless lan connection. X11 must transport a lot of 
image data and this is always a pain on slow (<100 MBit) connections.

Try connecting the windows machine with cable and compare the results.

bye
	ago
-- 
 Alexander.Gottwald@s1999.tu-chemnitz.de 
 http://www.gotti.org           ICQ: 126018723

Re: Xfree86/cygwin and speed

[Harold L Hunt II]

Alexander Gottwald wrote:
> On Fri, 9 Jan 2004 cforelle2@comcast.net wrote:
> 
> 
>>Hello all,
>>
>>I've got a question about speeding up application performance when using Xfree86 and Cygwin. Here's my configuration:
>>
>>Linux box connected by 100 Mbps Ethernet to router.
>>Windows machine connecting wirelessly at 11 Mbps (802.11b) to router.
>>
>>Cygwin with Xfree86 set up on Windows machine, X11 forwarding set up on Linux box. I connect from Windows machine to Linux box with Cygwin using ssh tunnelling. I can successfully run the Linux application remotely. All is pretty good.
>>
>>Trouble is, the application is The GIMP, and it is painfully slow on the Windows machine. Redrawing the image occurs in slow motion, and every time I move a dialog box, I've got to wait an eternity for the image to fill in. 
>>
>>Here's my question: How can I speed this up? Or, rather, where's the bottleneck?
>>
>>-Is it the 11Mbps wireless connection, in which case I'll think more deeply about shelling out for 802.11g equipment?

Yes, the problem is the wireless link.  802.11g is sufficiently fast to 
display images in Cygwin/X while 802.11b is not.  I use 802.11g at home 
all the time to get an Xdmcp session on my Linux machine and it is 
slower than 100 Mbps Ethernet, but it is fast enough to do what I need 
to do.  Dropping to 802.11b would not be acceptable for me.

Hope that helps,

Harold

Re: Xfree86/cygwin and speed

[Takuma Murakami]

Have you tried 'ssh -C'?

Takuma Murakami (murakami@ipl.t.u-tokyo.ac.jp)