Jukka Marin writes:

> On Tue, Oct 20, 1998 at 02:49:29PM +0300, Jukka Marin wrote:
> > Applix is very stable and reasonably priced, IMHO.  I've had problems
> > with XFree getting very slow with Applix, but it's possible this is
> > caused by the fvwm window manager (haven't had the time to test with
> > other wm's yet).
> 
> Well, it's not the window manager.  Or if it is, then both fvwm and kwm
> are just as bad.  Easy test: Open Applix Words, open the Character Format
> window.  Keep clicking the left mouse button on the color selection button
> for a while.  In the beginning, the colormap is drawn very quickly, but
> after some 20-40 clicks, things become noticeably slow.  After a while,
> it takes over a second to draw the colormap...  All other things in Applix
> slow down in the same way.

I recognise this.  Its Xfree86's handling of colourmaps.  The servers
slow down very rapidly if colourmap entries are not correctly freed
after use (probably does a linear search at allocation time).  They
also rapidly grow in size in memory :)

Shutting down the client and starting it up again will fix it, not
very satisfactory...

So its a bug in the application, though implementing some form of
colourmap caching in libX11 and linking it with problem applications
might be one way to fix the problem.