Starting an X11 client on another machine, without ssh

[Bill McGonigle]

On 03/23/2010 03:39 PM, Bill Freeman wrote:
> No.  When you take the easy way out and run "ssh foo at bar -Y", the established
> X connection runs through an encrypted tunnel, incurring a performance penalty.

Oh.  I think I understand the question now, it's not the resource 
overhead per-se that's the problem but the performance drag it could 
incur, leading to UI latency or slowness.  Yes?

Some things that might help:

1) run ssh -C to get compression. Depending on the efficiency of the 
virtual NIC this may or not help.  On a real network, this almost always 
helps, CPU's are just too fast today.
2) Chose an cipher that's well-tuned for your CPU.  8-ish years or so 
ago, I benchmarked '-C -c blowfish' at 17Mbps on then low-grade hardware 
on a 10/100 Ethernet.
2a) possibly run ssh with the null cipher, so you just get session 
setup.  Then you're only talking about stream encapsulation/multiplexing 
time as a resource drag, and that can be incredibly efficient code (OS's 
do this all day long, layer upon layer).
3) use NX.  This is probably the highest performance remote display, but 
takes a bit of doing to set up.  Hey, this would make a nice LUG talk if 
we have any well-versed users.

-Bill

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