Compression Performance of the Xremote Protocol
Abstract:
The Xremote protocol is a compressed transformation of the X Window
System protocol, designed to efficiently implement X connections
across relatively slow serial lines. Using an Xremote simulator and 11
traces of X sessions, we found that Xremote's overall compression
ratio is 2.4:1. This figure varies widely depending on the trace. A
study of compression ratio as a function of message type shows text
based messages commonly achieving 3:1 compression, while geometric
messages usually achieve only 1.6:1 compression. By examining
bandwidth requirements and compression performance as a function of
time, we see that Xremote performs adequately for some applications
which are text based or which use small geometric datasets, except at
application startup where more bandwidth is required. Further work is
required to adequately support the initialization stage of X
applications and medium to large geometric databases.