[CentOS] Enabling X on headless server via network

Sun Jul 25 20:01:43 UTC 2010
Stephen Harris <lists at spuddy.org>

On Sun, Jul 25, 2010 at 08:46:08PM +0300, Dotan Cohen wrote:
> On Sun, Jul 25, 2010 at 19:35, Stephen Harris <lists at spuddy.org> wrote:
> > Which shows it's working... but painfully slowly. ??Bandwidth and especially
> > latency is killing you.

> Other than getting a new ISP, is there anything that I can do about the latency?

Even another ISP may not help so much.  I have Verizon FIOS and am based on
the East Coast.  There's a 92ms delay to reach my linode, in Fremont.
Any message the X client sends to the server and then waits for a reply would
have approx 200ms round trip time.  I doesn't take long before these message
delays add up to a real long delay.

Even my local East Coast Panix v-colo has a 15ms delay; that's a lot smaller
but it still adds to the time it takes to open an application; especially
one as complicated as firefox which may make thousands of requests.

Hence FreeNX which, effectively, runs an X server on your remote machine
and sends screen data back to your local machine.  In this case the
round trip times are massively reduced to effectively "local machine"
speeds.

-- 

rgds
Stephen