On Mon, Dec 20, 1999 at 02:42:13PM -0500, Ken Hornstein wrote:
> >Once upon a time, there was a Finnish guy who whined about Applixware
> >being real slow on his NetBSD machine.  This guy is back!
> 
> This was a while ago .... but didn't we determine that the _root_
> problem was that Applixware caused the X server to do a whole lot of
> mallocs and free's, and that eventually caused the memory allocator
> to take forever?  That's my hazy memory on the subject.

Something like that, yes.  But why does the memory allocator get slower
and slower?  Isn't this some kind of a bug?

> - Try using an X protocol analyzer to see what Applixware is doing.
>   Do I have one?  No. Geez, someone should have _written_ one by now.
>   Does anyone know of such a thing?

I think one problem with Applix is that it uses synchronous requests
(or whatever they are called ;) to the X server and waits for the
request to be completed before sending the next request/command.  Why -
dunno.

> - Profile the X server to figure out what it is doing.
> - Once you've done one of those things, generate a test program
>   that reproduces this behavior (not an X program, I think the root
>   cause is far underneath).

Hmm, I guess I should dig up the old e-mails and see what was discovered
before..  I was hoping the problem would go away with the new VM system
and stuff, but it's still there.  Also, someone said that he did NOT have
the problem, so I thought it was something with my linux libraries.. but
now I have rebuilt my whole system from scratch and installed the libs
from pkgsrc and the problem is STILL there, so ..

> I know that in my case, I would like to help you ... but if the only
> way to reproduce the problem is "run Applix", well, it makes it rather
> difficult to reproduce it myself.

Maybe I should send you an Applixware CD.. I have purchased three copies
so far (because updates are unavailable or too expensive here!) :-I

  -jm