Re: X-windows performance over slow connections.

[Bill Zaumen]

On Fri, 2007-01-19 at 12:49 +0200, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> > From: Bill Zaumen <zaumen@pacbell.net>
> > Date: Thu, 18 Jan 2007 15:35:54 -0800
> > 
> > When I run ssh -C -X to connect to my home system over an ADSL
> > connection (unfortunately, in the 'slow' direction), it takes
> > well over a minute to start emacs.  I suspect this is due to the
> > menu, toolbar, scrollbars, and other X-windows features it uses.
> > Compression helps slightly, but is not quite enough.  I tried
> > to fix the problem by defining an environment variable named
> > EMACS_NET_PROFILE which, if defined, has the value "slow", "medium"
> > or "fast" to denote the speed of one's connection.  For slower
> > connections, it then turns off scroll bars, tool tips, menus, and
> > the tool bar based on the value of this variable.  Functionally,
> > this works as one would expect, however over a slow connection, I
> > can see the tool bar appear and then eventually go away: it seems
> > that the tool bar is created before my .emacs file is read, so
> > emacs takes about as long as before to get started.
> 
> Did you try the advice in etc/PROBLEMS?  Look for "Improving
> performance with slow X connections".
> 
> As for turning off various decorations, I think if you disable them in
> your X resources, they will never come up.

Thanks for your advice.  I looked through etc/PROBLEMS.  When I tried
the option --without-xim emacs reports that this is an unknown option
(I'm running ubuntu 6.0 (dapper), and I guess emacs was compiled
without XIM).  I couldn't find lbxproxy in a package search for
the version of ubuntu linux I'm running, but I was using the -C option
to ssh. I did find a bug report about lbxproxy being missing,
although lbxproxy was available in older versions.

Unfortunately, disabling decorations in X resources is a bit
problematic for what I'm doing: the problem came up when I was trying
to use a system at home from a coffee shop using a laptop, connecting
to my desktop system via ssh, but I would also use emacs on the laptop
to edit files there, so both were using the same X server, sometimes
at the same time.  Given that I'm using a slow connection infrequently,
making emacs less capable the rest of the time is not an attractive
option.

                Regards,

                Bill