re animation with xputimage in article apr dsd es com pmartz dsd es com paul martz writes in article apr infodev cam ac uk dcr mail ast cam ac uk derek c richardson writes hi i m new to this group so please bear with me two years ago i wrote a sunview application for fast animation of raster files with sunview becoming rapidly obselete i ve finally decided to rewrite everything from scratch in xview i put together a quick test and i ve found that xputimage is considerably slower factor of on average than the sunview command pw rop which moves image data from memory pixrects to a canvas this was on a sparc ipx it seems that the x protocol communication is slowing things down or xputimage is inefficient or both using xputimage your source is maintained by the client and the destination is maintained by the server thus you incur the overhead of transporting through whatever client server communications mechanism you are using is it possible for you to maintain your source images in pixmaps these are maintained by the server so copying them into a window is much cheaper also make sure you are not sending any unnecessary xsyncs or running in xsynchonize mode if you need speed and your client can run on the same host as the x server you should use the shared memory extension to the sample x server mit shm xdpyinfo will tell you if your server has this extension this is certainly available with the sample mit x server running under sunos a word of warning make sure your kernel is configured to support shared memory and another word of warning openwindows is slower than the mit server i have written an imaging tool using xview for the gui by the way which yields over frames per second for bit images running on a sparc ipc half the cpu grunt of an ipx this has proved quite sufficient for animations regards richard gooch
