Steven Pritchard wrote:
On Wed, Nov 15, 2006 at 09:49:06AM -0500, Adam Jackson wrote:Sure, but that doesn't explain why we use it for local font access.Old (386/486-era) systems with no FPU would seem to hang for seconds at a time while the X server rendered fonts. Even on systems with an FPU, using the font server made X *much* more responsive/smooth.
Numbers would be a fantastic thing to introduce to the discussion here, if anyone has them. I'm generally not fond of handwavey performance decisions in the name of low-end machines without some proof.
I can personally attest that at least for the OLPC machine, which has a pretty crippled FPU, the performance problem for font rendering appeared to be the rendering itself, and not so much font load and metric time. But I don't have numbers immediately at hand to back that up. (And OLPC ended up dropping xfs for footprint reasons anyway.)
- ajax