On Mon, Jun 02, 2003 at 01:35:01PM -0700, Thanasis Kinias wrote:
> Now, if you're _really_ unconcerned about security, change $DISPLAY on
> the remote host from 'localhost:10.0' (that's usually what ssh -X sets
> it to) to '$HOST:0.0' where $HOST is the host you're sshing in from.
> This will be snappier because it skips the tunelling and encryption.
> It is also very insecure.

With a modern processor, I would think that the tunelling/encryption
portion would have little effect on the response of X11 applications.

One thing to look into may be Low-Bandwidth X (LBX).  You may find a
mini-HOWTO on:

http://www.paulandlesley.org/faqs/LBX-HOWTO.html

However, from the link:

   11.2 Ssh (Secure Shell)

   Ken Chase <lbxhowto@sizone.org> notes that ssh can be used for
   compression. Although its main purpose is to provide security, it
   also compresses the data it sends.

   Thus, if you run X over a ssh link you will automatically obtain some
   amount of compression.

   11.3 Which Is Better?

   I don't know. Both LBX and dxpc are certainly better at raw
   compression than ssh. Of course, ssh provides the added advantage of
   security. And of course, there's no reason you can't use both ssh and
   one of the other two, to get good compression and security.

   It shouldn't be hard to run some benchmarking against these options
   and get both subjective and statistical measurings of
   performance. But I haven't done this, and I don't know of anyone who
   has.

Thus, you may want to ensure that SSH compression is enabled ("ssh -C").
You can further tune the performance by playing with the
CompressionLevel option.

Good luck.

-- 
                                                           Voltage Spike
      ,,,
     (. .)
--ooO-(_)-Ooo--