Bruttaly sluggish Eclipse performance in remote X

[Magnus Gustavsson]

Dimi Paun <dimi <at> lattica.com> writes:

> However, the deal break has been Eclipse.

I've had a fair amount of problems with Eclipse and X-forwarding as well. They
seems to be of a different kind than yours, but I thought I'd mention my
experiences anyway. If nothing else, perhaps somebody has a suggestion about
what to do?

I'm running a Sun Ray server on RHEL4. When I use X-forwarding via SSH to a
RHEL5- or Debian 4.0 (Etch) machine, Eclipse becomes extremly slow. That's
hardly surprising if I take a look at the network traffic; just scrolling down a
few pages in Eclipse generates more than 100 MiB of X11 data. I've never had
this problem before, and that's because when I use X-forwarding to a RHEL4- or
Debian 3.1 (Sarge) machine, the generated traffic "only" amounts to 5-10 MiB,
and then the server can cope with it.

I don't have this problem with other applications, and if I run Eclipse via
X-forwarding on the console of the Sun Ray server (instead of from a Sun Ray
client), the generated amount of traffic is much lower. Analyzing the network
traffic makes me suspect that the reason is that Xnewt (the Sun Ray X-server)
doesn't support the RENDER extension to X11.

I havn't managed to figure out what the big difference is between RHEL4/Sarge on
one hand and RHEL5/Etch on the other though, and if there's something I can do
about, say, the fonts to at least make it usable until a better solution can be
found.