Anyone else think X has a performance problem ?

[john wendel]

I first noticed the X slowdown when I installed F8. I've used every
version of Fedora, and I noticed that the user experience with F8 was
not as smooth as earlier versions. I spend most of my day hacking code 
in vi, so 2D video performance is important to me. I care nothing about 
3D video.

When I updated my work box (P III - 512 MB) from FC6 to F10, the
slowdown was so bad that I was tempted to reinstall FC6. Basically, F10
converted a very usable older box into something that was almost unusable.

So, I decided to collect a few numbers and post them to see if we can 
get a little discussion going and maybe provide some feedback to some 
developers who could actually improve things.

I've got boxes at home running FC6, F8, and F10. The FC6 box is an old 
AMD Athlon 2Ghz 1.5GB memory, the F8 box is a P4 3 Ghz 2GB memory, and 
the F10 box is an Intel Core2 2.2 Ghz 4GB memory.

For the test, I created a 1,000,000 line (80 byte lines, 80 MB) text
file and timed "cat file" on all the boxes, with and without X. I ran 
the test several times and reported the fastest time. I also tried 
turning off anti-aliased text, but that was actually slower.

Bottom line, FC6 running X was 6 times faster than F8 and over 8 times
faster than F10. I know that there have been many, many improvements in 
Fedora over the years, but X looks like it's taking a big step backward. 
And don't tell me the eye-candy is much better, because I don't care.

If I'm full of shit, please let me know how I can get better X performance.

Maybe someone with ATI video could run the test and post some results.

Regards,

John


FC6 - KDE 3.5.7-9 FC6 - Nvidia video "nv" driver - LCD 1280 x 1024

Console - No X

real    0m31.252s
user    0m0.000s
sys     0m31.245s

X - KDE konsole - 24 x 80

real    0m33.218s
user    0m0.027s
sys     0m0.853s

F8 - XFCE 4.6 - Nvidia video "nv" driver - LCD 1680 x 1050

Console - No X

real    0m27.184s
user    0m0.003s
sys     0m27.178s

X - xfce console - 24 x 80 - LCD 1920 x 1080

real    3m22.129s
user    0m0.023s
sys     0m0.830s

F10 - XFCE 4.4 - Intel video

Console - No X

real    1m40.978s
user    0m0.004s
sys     1m40.956s

X - xfce console - 24 x 80

real    4m53.576s
user    0m0.000s
sys     0m0.036s