I did mention compression of the X session itself by way of compressing the SSH tunnel. The problems run deeper than "software devs just painting everthing int

I did mention compression of the X session itself by way of compressing the SSH tunnel. The problems run deeper than "software devs just painting everthing into image". X itself has a mix of synchronous and asynchronous calls that are very sensitive to latency. XCB instead Xlib and use of LBX can help but do not eliminate the performance issues with X Window. See http://keithp.com/~keithp/talks/usenix2003/html/net.html http://keithp.com/~keithp/talks/usenix2003/html/net.html and http://vis.lbl.gov/Events/SC08/RemoteX/index.html http://vis.lbl.gov/Events/SC08/RemoteX/index.html for more details. As it relates to the original topic I'd be interested to see real-world performance comparisons between Plan 9 and X because as the papers state X stinks on ice over the WAN.