[forum] Re: how to write snappy benchmark?

[Marko Macek]

Hi!

David Jeske wrote:
> I'm interested in soliciting ideas about how to write this "snappy"
> benchmark that's been referred to a few times. While I don't have time
> to write the benchmarks, if I can get a clear picture of what will
> help, I may be able to project manage and pay to have them
> written. Here is how I would state the objective:

A good base for benchmark is:

$ while true ; do xrefresh ; sleep 0.1 ; done

(time could be varied, and implemented in C for less overhead)

Things that can be done with it:

1) observe repaints. Ideally, nothing on the screen will blink
(the only app I can find that does this right is Mozilla,
mostly by my efforts).

This requires usage of double buffering and not using window background 
pixmaps at all (except when they paint the window completely).

2) measure CPU usage for tested app, X server.

3) For apps/toolkits that don't compress exposes well you can
observe how long it takes them to catch up.

Hope this helps.

Mark