Subject: Re: NeWS speed

From: [email-masked] (Guy Harris)
Date: Sat, 16 May 87 04:05:19 EDT

Date: 15 May 87 06:16:34 GMT
From: [email-masked]  (Guy Harris)
Subject: Re: NeWS speed

> A friend of mine said that AI group at MIT is never going to be running
> NeWS on many workstations. One of the reasons he gave was that X will
> always be at least a factor of 3 faster than NeWS.
>
> I started thinking about all of the atoi() that news always has to do,
> and the fact that it is interperted, and am beginning to think that he
> might be right. Is there any truth to this?

Well:

   1) I don't know that the ASCII-to-binary conversions are
      necessarily going to make much difference:

	a) There is a "compressed" format that can be used for sending
	   PostScript over the wire.

	b) Applications may be able to make use of the
	   programmability of NeWS to reduce communication overhead,
	   so there may be more drawing, etc. than I/O.

   2) Yes, NeWS has an interpreter, but will it be spending most of
      its time interpreting PostScript or computing images?

If the claim is made that X is now at least a factor or 3 faster than
NeWS, the only way to ascertain whether this claim is true or false
would be to test it with a given application or set of applications.
Does anybody have this sort of data?

If the claim is made that X will always be at least a factor of 3
faster than NeWS, I would tend to doubt this claim simply because I
tend to doubt *any* bold sweeping claim about performance.  Bold
sweeping claims about performance quite often turn out to be false.
After all, at one point people thought networked window systems would
be unacceptably slow (in fact, I remember James Gosling saying in a
talk that before Andrew was built *he* originally suspected they
would be unacceptably slow).

X and NeWS are large complicated systems; only somebody quite
familiar with the innards of both would be able to make even
approximate quantitative claims like that.  Furthermore, such a claim
cannot be made without some knowledge of the types of applications
likely to be run under X and NeWS and the fashion in which those
applications use the facilities of X and NeWS.