Re: Net Bandwith: X-Server vs PC Client/Server

I think your bigger issue other than network traffic is whether your XClient can run multiple MOTIF applications (On the other of 20 or 50 or 100 at a time) without a severe degredation in performance... THat is, XWIndows takes a lot of processing power not only at the PC (XServer) But at the hardware running the application (XClient). So even if the bandwidths were similar, you are probably going to spend a lot more money on making your XClient hardware superfast and responsive.

Also, it depends on your organization. If everyone is PC Based with WIndows capabable PCs with 8 megs of RAM itself, then it doesnt make much sense (If the bandwidths are equal) to go with an XCLient way of doing things because thats what PCs are for! ..One of the MAIN ideas of Client Server is that you offload processing where it should be... IMHO, GUI Interfaces should be local
(Client Side) if you already have the hardware capable of doing it.

Anyway, I do not know how much network bandwidth XWindows really takes up
(You may want to post on the XWindows newsgroup also) but I am pretty sure
that it varies depending on the type and complexity of data sent. Obviously if your appllication is multimedia, you are going to have a lot of processing time spent on the XCLient and XServer side taking care of the display of animaition or rapid succession of pictures..Where if you had just PowerBuilder, you would only have to waste processing power for that on the PC side.

As a sidenote, also any decent XWIndows emulator for Windows costs a pretty penny as well and take up plenty of resources and are not all that fast relatively speaking.

Later,
  Gunther Received on Mon Jan 10 1994 - 03:20:41 CET