[plug] display overhead

[Craig Ringer]

>>What I mean to say is that some developers of terminal emulators may
>>perceive it to be a "feature not a bug" if the virtual terminal acts
>>like a real terminal ;-)
> 
> And if you don't... run your trendy new gunwhale-down-with-chrome app 
> over a modem link and see if you that doesn't inspire you to optimise 
> some things.

Uggh. All too familiar with that one - I reported some "interesting" 
mozilla drawing bugs in the pre-1.0 days that I was able to see by 
running it over 128k ADSL.

> In the Bad Old Days, the technique was simply to step your terminal back 
> to 300 baud and run your app. I remember watching a CoBOL programmer's 
> face when we did that to his app and he could see the cursor repainting 
> some fields up to 14 times. Suddenly, he understood why the boss was 
> complaining about how slow it was to run from home (over a 2400 baud 
> dialup).

It's an excellent trick. One that can be interesting now is to set up an 
ancient computer as an xterm, and watch how your app behaves when the X 
server is slow as molasses. That way you can have the entire test setup 
in one room - a bit like doing the 300baud test with null-modem.

Craig Ringer

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