On Tue, 8 Oct 2002, Ian Piumarta wrote:

> On Mon, 7 Oct 2002, Aaron J Reichow wrote:
> > On Tue, 8 Oct 2002, Ian Piumarta wrote:
> > > if your VM runs on one processor and your X server on another then
> > > you should see an improvement for graphics-bound code.
> 
> I can get the ratio to 5:1 Squeak:X by scrolling a large window of text.
> 
> Every time Squeak does screen (or keyboard/mouse) i/o it's fighting with X
> server for resources.  One of the "improving performance" hints in the X11
> FAQ is to run clients on a different machine, which is the same thing as
> "one of your other processors" modulo the network.  (This doesn't work
> well for Squeak since it stores the display as a client-side image and the
> network bandwith goes through the roof when you try to run it remotely.
> OTOH, running it on one of your other processors should yield the same
> advantages as running remotely but without any of the disadvantages of
> network saturation -- particularly when using shared memory to send the
> image to the server.)
> 
> But I'm only guessing.  Maybe somebody with a SMP machine can testify from
> experience.

I'm running on a dual-processor PIII 600MHz here. Scrolling a text window 
utilizes one CPU to almost 100%, X is using the second processor:

bert.balloon ~ > squeak  -xshm -display unix:0  &
bert.balloon ~ > top
 PID USER     PRI  NI  SIZE  RSS SHARE LC STAT %CPU %MEM   TIME COMMAND
2711 bert      11   0 12820  12M  4268  1 R    99.8  5.0   1:11 squeak
1441 root       9   0  147M  19M  9132  0 S    16.2  7.6   6:25 X

Of cource, doing it without shared memory increases the load for X:

bert.balloon ~ > squeak &              
bert.balloon ~ > top
  PID USER     PRI  NI  SIZE  RSS SHARE LC STAT %CPU %MEM   TIME COMMAND
 2772 bert      14   0 13504  13M  1076  0 R    90.5  5.3   1:15 squeak
 1441 root      10   0  144M  16M  6080  1 R    33.6  6.4   7:17 X


-- Bert