Bad NIH, good NIH

It depends on what do you want to benchmark. If you're just curious "how fast would it be next time I try" then yes. But if your goal is to compare two programs then you must reduce impact of all other obstacles, i.e. cpu throttles, disk cache, memory/swap, other programs running, etc.

> I just wanted to disagree with your claim that slow startup is not an issue, because it very frequently is when you are running remote X clients. It happens that the example you picked was one that demonstrated the difference particularly clearly.

I was just trying to say that "core protocol imposes restrictions that cannot be avoided (e.g. slow startup due to multiple roundtrips)" is not true. Slow startup is not X11 issue when running locally. Wayland only makes things worse. Applications would ofter start slower on Wayland because they're expected to talk to hardware, which requires additional steps for hardware initialization.

As for remote startup it's not that fast because of software, not because of protocol limitations. For example it could be much faster if xterm was sending requests in batch instead of waiting for response every time before sending another request. But people are lazy... They don't like optimizing things. But they like rewriting things from scratch somewhy. It's not a problem of X11 protocol, it's a human problem.