Best Squeak setup for servers

Lex Spoon lex at cc.gatech.edu
Sun Nov 16 05:08:36 UTC 2003


"Andreas Raab" <andreas.raab at gmx.de> wrote:
> > I'm confused.  For local displaying, Morphic does operations on its
> > local Display bitmap, and then the damaged areas get forced to the
> > screen all at once.
> 
> I think what John is saying is that "all at once" is the problem. E.g., the
> time needed for the flush can be significant if it's done synchronously and
> making this asynchronous (e.g., send it _while_ Squeak is doing other stuff)
> may improve performance. 

I see.



> > Incidentally, if you really want high performance and are willing to
> > spend some programming time to make it happen, then you are almost
> > certainly better off by starting with Nebraska.
> 
> As always the truth is somewhere in the middle. The tradeoffs are quite
> different. Indeed I would argue that a "mixed model" in Nebraska which
> allows you to simply remember dirty regions of the (local) Display might be
> a worthwhile addition (those would be send "VNC-style" at the end of the
> update cycle). For example, this could be used to transmit fonts and
> (static) forms lazily without having an initial hit on the bandwidth
> required. So Nebraska could (initially) start out just sending bits, then
> send more high-level commands.
> 

Absolutely.  What I meant was, if you want the best overall behavior,
then you will want to work inside of Squeak instead of trying to trick
an external VNC server into doing better things.  Certainly sending
bitmaps will win in some cases over sending the drawing commands. 
Although, if you cache forms nicely, it would seem to be rare.


Lex



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