Xfree86/cygwin and speed

cforelle2@comcast.net cforelle2@comcast.net
Fri Jan 9 15:54:00 GMT 2004


Hello all,

I've got a question about speeding up application performance when using Xfree86 and Cygwin. Here's my configuration:

Linux box connected by 100 Mbps Ethernet to router.
Windows machine connecting wirelessly at 11 Mbps (802.11b) to router.

Cygwin with Xfree86 set up on Windows machine, X11 forwarding set up on Linux box. I connect from Windows machine to Linux box with Cygwin using ssh tunnelling. I can successfully run the Linux application remotely. All is pretty good.

Trouble is, the application is The GIMP, and it is painfully slow on the Windows machine. Redrawing the image occurs in slow motion, and every time I move a dialog box, I've got to wait an eternity for the image to fill in. 

Here's my question: How can I speed this up? Or, rather, where's the bottleneck?

-Is it the cygwin dll emulation, in which case I suppose there isn't anything to do?

-Is it the 11Mbps wireless connection, in which case I'll think more deeply about shelling out for 802.11g equipment?

-Is the Linux machine too slow? (It runs GIMP locally just fine.)

-Is the Windows machine too slow? (It should be fast enough to run the GIMP just fine.)

-Is it the fact that traffic is slowed down by encryption over the ssh tunnel?

-Is there something else I can do, config wise, to try to liven things up?

Any insight would be most appreciated.

Thanks and regards,

Charles.



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