Tk slow over remote connections

From: James Allen (malveka_at_yahoo.com)
Date: 03/31/04 

Date: 31 Mar 2004 11:18:51 -0800

Hi,

I suspect this topic has been discussed before, but my searches of the
group have turned up only passing references to the problem I am
observing.

My group recently re-wrote a portion of our GUI in Tcl/Tk, while
leaving other portions (which run in separate processes) in C/Motif/X.
 Overall the effort was fairly successful, and most of us have become
rather enamoured of Tcl/Tk.

A problem that we are seeing, however, and which is being reported by
our users, is that the Tcl/Tk portion of the GUI runs with incredibly
painful slowness over remote connections.

For example, when working from home I connect via a cable modem and
establish a VPN session with my workplace. I have tried both XWin-32
and Exceed and the results are the same. The portions of our GUI
written in C/Motif/X are, with some grinding of teeth, usable. The
portion written in Tcl/Tk is completely unusable. The difference is
quite striking.

I know that X protocol over any sort of "low bandwidth" connection is
painful, but the difference between the Tcl/Tk GUI and the C/Motif GUI
puzzles me.

I have experimented with other Tcl/Tk programs, such as tkdiff, and
find they have the same behavior. My subjective impression is that Tk
may be making inefficient use of X. I've noticed that popping-up a Tk
window will result in parts of the window (e.g. pull down menu)
redrawing over and over and over before the window is completely
rendered.

I'm wondering if there are any X server extensions that may be missing
from my X emulators that Tk relies upon. I've tried using dxpc to
compress the X protocol stream, but that didn't help.

Can anyone offer me any insight into this problem and what might be
done to fix it?

Thanks!

James Allen

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