Performance problems on slow Win98 computers

[Jay Smith]

Shachar,

I would also take a look at the amount of video memory available and the 
video card itself.

We have a similar setup on some machines except that they are 300 or 400 
MHZ processors but we are running Windows 95 instead of 98.  The important 
thing, however, is that when we switched from Gnome to KDE, performance 
(graphics speed) declined about 30% and Cygwin/X crashes increased from one 
per week to as many as 4 per day.  The number of crashes depends upon how 
many X applications are being run -- and how many dialog boxes get opened. 
The best way to crash a machine is to print from Linux/KDE Mozilla (using 
CUPS) a number of times.  Printing 15 jobs is about the limit -- Cygwin/X 
will crash.  We have a weekly time-sensitive "job" we have to do that 
involves printing about 100 web pages within a one hour period.  It takes 
two people and three computers to do it -- one person to do the printing 
and the other person to restart Cygwin/X and get the programs running again.

Anyway, 200 MHZ is pretty slow to run widget-rich KDE.  One thing we did 
that helped a bit was to use a KDE desktop scheme that has smaller, less 
complex icons.  With that each user might only crash once per day (unless 
they start printing...).

Jay

Shachar Shemesh said the following on 07/04/2004 07:05 AM:
> Hi all,
> 
> I'm trying to use a win98 computer (about 200MHZ) as a full screen dumb 
> terminal to a Linux computer running KDE, using XDMCP. Everything works, 
> but I'm having severe latency problems with this setup.
> 
> When I switch to faster computers, the latency problem goes away. The 
> problem seems to be with the cygwin/X load on the computer.
> 
> I have read somewhere that cygwin's X will use a shared memory driver if 
> one is available. Could me not running the driver be the cause? Where 
> can the driver be found (what cygwin package)? Or is it just that the 
> computer is simply not fast enough to run our X server?
> 
> Another question has to do with shift processing. When I run xev, I can 
> see that pressing the right shift causes a "LSHIFT" to be received. This 
> is blocking certain applications that switch paragraph direction using a 
> ctrl+lshift or ctrl+rshift combination. Is this a configuration problem 
> on my end?
> 
>                   Shachar