*** Xtoolwait 1.3 *** Richard Huveneers <richard@hekkihek.hacom.nl> This utility notably decreases the startup time of your X sessions, provided that you start a number of X clients automatically during the X session startup. Most people, for instance, start X clients like xterm, xclock, xconsole and xosview from their .xinitrc, .openwin-init, .xtoolplaces or .xsession file. These X clients are started simultaneously (in the background) which puts a high load on the X server and the OS: * The X server is not multi-threaded, so all X clients are competing to get access to the X server and to use its resources, which causes a lot of overhead (= delay). * The performance of other (non X related) tasks served by the system degrades badly due to the high load. If the system has not enough RAM to hold all the X clients, it is swapping heavily, resulting again in a lot of delay. On the Sun platform there is a utility called 'toolwait' which solves these problems: it starts one X client in the background, waits until it has mapped a window and then exits. Xtoolwait is a free implementation of exactly the same idea. HISTORY Of course I first looked around if somebody else already wrote a similar utility. I first stumbled upon this simple, but useless, shell script: #!/bin/sh ${1+"$@"}& Then I found 'toolwait-0.9' written by Brandon S. Allbery. His program relies on the XView libraries to receive events from the X server. For some reason this method fails to detect about 50% of the X events, resulting in an equal amount of time-outs. So I decided to write Xtoolwait. The result is this small, clean utility which only uses standard Xlib calls and works 100% for me. After releasing Xtoolwait 0.1, someone told me about xrunclient, which is included in the MIT X11 distribution. Since both utilities share the same goal, I would probably not have bothered to write Xtoolwait if I had known of xrunclient before. So, why should you use Xtoolwait instead of xrunclient? Simply because Xtoolwait does the job much better, as is readily shown by timing the startup of X clients like xterm. SUPPORTED PLATFORMS This list is far from complete. I expect Xtoolwait to run under _any_ operating system, X11 release and window manager. If you are using Xtoolwait under an unlisted operating system, X11 release or window manager, please let me know. Xtoolwait is known to work on these platforms: Operating system: Linux 1.x, 2.x Ultrix 4.4 DEC OSF/1 3.0 Solaris 2.4 SunOS 4.1.x SGI IRIX 5.2 X11 release: X11R5 X11R6 X11R6.1 Window manager: olvwm 4 olwm (version?) tvtwm R5.7 twm R6 fvwm 1.23b fvwm2 kwm v0.11 INSTALLATION Installing Xtoolwait is very easy: xmkmf make make install make install.man USAGE This is the relevant part of my own .xinitrc file, showing the proper use of xtoolwait: # # Startup the window manager first # olvwm & wmpid=$! # # Restore desktop settings # Do _not_ put xtoolwait in the background # xtoolwait -mappings 2 contool -Wp 30 30 -Ws 575 246 -WP 3 533 -Wi xtoolwait xeyes -geom 77x60+640+107 xtoolwait ansi_xterm -geom 80x24+22+11 xtoolwait clock -Wp 90 90 -Ws 150 150 -WP 733 110 -Wi # # Wait for the window manager # wait $wmpid Note that the window manager must be started first. Xtoolwait depends on it to detect window mappings. The first instance of Xtoolwait will wait until both the window manager and the X client have finished their initialization. Note also that the first Xtoolwait uses the -mappings option to detect the virtual desktop window, which is mapped by virtual window managers. Omit this option if you use a non-virtual window manager. Do not put Xtoolwait in the background with an '&'. When Xtoolwait detects a window mapping it will put the X client in the background and exit. Xtoolwait has a few options. Examine the manual page (man xtoolwait) after the installation. COPYRIGHT Copyright (C) 1995-1999 Richard Huveneers <richard@hekkihek.hacom.nl> Xtoolwait is released under the GNU General Public License. The full copyright notice is stated at the start of the source code. SUPPORT Support for Xtoolwait has been integrated in the official distribution of Xtoolplaces. Using the -w option of Xtoolplaces, saved desktop configurations will automatically be restored using Xtoolwait. Xtoolplaces is written by Adam Stein <adam@iset.scan.mc.xerox.com> and is available at http://www.csh.rit.edu/~adam/Progs/programs.html New releases of Xtoolwait will be available at http://www.hacom.nl/~richard/software/xtoolwait.html Enjoy, Richard Huveneers <richard@hekkihek.hacom.nl>
