LPC: Life after X

LPC: Life after X

Here's a real example from the 10MB days: early web browsers often had their their application logo at the top corner of the window, and would run a little animation loop when loading a page. I believe in Netscape's case it would send the entire logo image to the X server for every frame of animation. This worked fine on the same machine because it could use things like XSHM to send the image data out-of-band, but when running remotely it meant it was continuously and repeatedly encoding and transmitting each frame of the animation through the X protocol.

If they had designed for network transparency they presumably would instead have cached the frames as a handful of server-side pixmaps and flipped between them. It seems like a little thing, but as I recall this minor oversight made it perform terribly over a LAN.