dxpc 3.9.0 review

dxpc is a Differential X Protocol Compressor that improves X11 performance over low-bandwidth network connections. The Client Prox

License: BSD License File size: 186K Developer: Brian Pane

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dxpc is a Differential X Protocol Compressor that improves X11 performance over low-bandwidth network connections.

The Client Proxy mimics an X server. X client applications connect to the Client Proxy using display "unix:8" (or ":8"; dxpc supports both UNIX domain and TCP sockets). The Client Proxy receives X requests from the application, compresses them, and sends them to the Server Proxy. The Server Proxy uncompresses the requests and sends them to the real X server. Similarly, the Server Proxy receives X events, replies, and errors from the real X server. It compresses these messages and sends them to the Client Proxy, which uncompresses them and sends them to the client application.

dxpc attempts to exploit patterns in X protocol messages to limit the amount of data sent between the Client Proxy and Server Proxy. For many X message types, each field has a high probability of having the same value as it had in some previous message of the the same type. For such fields, dxpc maintains caches of the last 'n' values, with a least-recently-used replacement policy. If a field value in a new message is already present in the corresponding cache, dxpc transmits the value's index within the cache rather than the value itself. Because the number of bits needed to represent this index is typically much smaller than the number of bits needed to represent the value itself, transmission of cache indices typically results in a significant reduction in the number of bytes transmitted over the low-bandwidth link.

In other cases, the value of a field in an X message may differ from that field's value in the last message of the same type by a small value. Some X messages contain sequence numbers or timestamps that have this property. X requests that create new objects also tend to have this property; in a "Create Window" request, for example,
the value of the "Window ID" being created is typically equal to "(Window ID of the last window created) + (some small positive integer)." For fields like these, dxpc transmits the difference between the field value in the new message and the value of the corresponding field in the previous message of the same type. This value usually is a
small number that can be encoded in far fewer bits than the actual field value.

Requirements:
LZO compression library

What's New in This Release:
Improvements in encoding resulting in considerably lower CPU utilization.
Native Windows binaries are available.