A dynamic profile of window system usage

To obtain a dynamic profile of user input and application requests, an instrumented version of the X window was built and installed on a number of workstations. It was found that in the environment under study, over 90% of all requests are to display text, draw a rectangle, or fill a rectangle. Most text strings, vectors, windows, and area fills are relatively small; most area copies are large. The X client library reduces communication overhead by batching an average of four requests to the server in a single message. Thus, the data show that current server-based window system protocols can be quite efficient in actual use