Poor performance on a specific app (Together/J) under VNC

[Russ Ferriday]

I would appreciate any suggestions regarding a performance problem I'm 
having.

Background:
We develop Java apps using Together/J and NetBeans running on a dual 
Pentium 1GHz with 1GB RAM, with Linux 7.1. We have vnc 3.3.3r2 and start 
the server like this...
   vncserver -cc3 -geometry 1600x1200
Classic VNC setup, just switched to KDE as window manager. Very happy in 
general.

Reference point:
Under KDE or FVWM2 on the console Together/J and Netbeans work fine. 
Fast response, no problems.

Problem under VNC:
Together/J runs pretty poorly when editing code, selecting text with a 
double click, etc.
However Netbeans runs fine - very fast.

Easy to see why once you fire up Ethereal...
There is vastly more network traffic with Together/J than with Netbeans 
on similar work. Highlight a word and Together/J updates a whole text 
control sending 1.3MB of data to the viewer, where Netbeans sends less 
than 100KB.

Short of rewriting Together/J, and all the performance suggestions in 
the FAQ, are there any options for working around the problem? It seems 
that the update to the large text control causes masses of redundant 
data to traverse the network, when actually only the highlighting on a 
word has changed. This is counterintiuitive to me, and I would not have 
expected only pure framebuffer changes to be relayed. Another piece of 
information, it seems that the text background ends up with some 
dithering on it that we are unable to eliminate. This would explain why 
the encoded area takes up 1.3MB.

Thoughts?

-- 
===========================================================
Russ Ferriday                           (805) 543-4895 x206
Chief Technical Officer
Focus Learning Corporation
San Luis Obispo, CA
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