re blinking cursor in xterm in article tbpi innfp early bird think com barmar think com barry margolin writes in article may taylor uucp mark taylor uucp mark a davis writes you are stuck in a distributed system feedback loop what if you are on an xterminal or running xterm over the net to another machine that is when the load problems occur if you had a machine with xterminals attached and they all had blinking cursors in xterm s this could represent a considerable ethernet bandwidth waste ethernet certainly has enough bandwidth for a few blinking cursors my lisp machine blinks the cursor twice a second and updates the time in the status line every second this uses under k bytes second or about of the bandwidth of ethernet a hundred of them on a single ethernet might be a problem but a couple dozen should be fine bandwidth is unlikely to be the problem except over a wet string network one of major flaws of x is the horrendous number of transactions and hence process switches that it forces upon a host actual measurements hourly average are per second per logged in user which can lead to or more process switches depending on whether each event is filtered by the window manager as well as the applications and how many processes are needed for each character while a blinking cursor needs only the application and the networking process and does not add any transactions it will add something like process switches per second per user this is a significant increase in overhead especially as the application may have quite a large working set if you want a rapidly blinking cursor there could be as many as if you want to go there i wouldn t start from here nick maclaren university of cambridge computer laboratory new museums site pembroke street cambridge cb qg england email nmm cus cam ac uk tel fax
