re animation with xputimage shared memory putimage also mentioned by nkissebe delphi beckman uiuc edu nick kisseberth looks interesting but i need someone to point me to some documentation is this method likely to give better results than server resident pixmaps i d also be interested in looking at the xview code mentioned above there is no easy answer to this question it depends on whether the display device can hold pixmaps in off screen memory and if so how efficiently the server manages these resources having to deal with limited off screen memory is the bane of the server implementor s existence i have worked with graphics devices where the off screen memory to main display copy rate eclipses that of the main memory to display copy rate and with those where the main memory to display is faster than off screen to display requires only a write to the framebuffer rather than a read of the f b followed by a write if your server uses the cfb code or something like it to render into pixmaps in cpu main memory the rates you can get through mit shm are likely to be equal maybe a tad slower depending on your os s implementation of shared memory to copyarea from pixmap to window which is also then just a copy from cpu main memory to graphics device one advanage of mit shm is that if your images are large you don t end up growing the size of the server process to hold them one disadvantage of the mit shm is that in its sample implementation there is no provision for elegantly cleaning up the shared memory segments if the client dies a sudden violent death e g kill you have to be mindful of cluttering up the system with zombie shared memory segments ken kenneth whaley kubota pacific computer inc email whaley kpc com walsh avenue santa clara ca
