BC4 unusably slow on SUSE Linux 11 with Cygwin/X server.

[Ferg22]

I need to run beyond compare on a SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11 which I access using ssh from a Windows-7 machine.

I already use X-windows to run various GUI applications on Linux which display on the Windows-7 screen. The windows machine is running Cygwin/X (1.18.4) as a X server all apps appear to work quite well.

However beyond compare 4.19 is almost unusably slow. For instance, although the initial screen appears in reasonable time, if I bring up the "help->about" screen the dialog box appears but is blank. Dragging the box around the screen causes it to refresh and its contents appear. Most aspects of the interface take seconds to respond or require moving boxes about.

I verified the issue using whatever X-server is within MobaXterm_v9.4. Same behaviour.

Is this a known problem? Is there a work around?

[Aaron]

Hello,

We have other users running in various Cygwin combinations, but don't officially support running the Linux version on Windows with Cygwin. Have you installed the 32bit or 64bit version of the Linux BC4? We made a lot of backend changes in BC4.2; if you install the BC4.2 beta, does this behave better for you?
http://www.scootersoftware.com/download.php?zz=beta42

[Ferg22]

Thanks for the reply.

I have the 64bit version.

I was running v4.1.9 so I downloaded the v4.2 64.bit rpm and used "zypper install" to update my installation however the behavior was exactly the same. Using bcompare I see a number of blank dialog boxes which if left alone I feel would never populate themselves. Dragging the dialog round the screen causes it to refresh.

[Aaron]

Do you have local access of to the SUSE Linux 11, that has the linux install of BC4.2 on it? A good test would be to try to locally launch the application to see if it behaves similarly.

OpenSUSE and SUSE Enterprise are not technically on our supported platforms list, but generally users are able to install and use it with all updates applied.
http://www.scootersoftware.com/download.php?zz=kb_linux

Also, all BC4.x licenses are multiplatform, or could be upgraded to multiplatform to free. Is installing the Windows version and connecting via SFTP to the Linux server an option?

[Aaron]

Testing in office (clarify: with Centos as the destination server), we've reproduced the draw issue, but there's no apparently slowness. It may be two unrelated issues; how are you connecting to your server?

[Aaron]

Additionally, researching shows that mobaxterm is powered by cygwin. We also tested Linux to Linux and did not encounter the draw issue, so this appears to be a cygwin specific bug. Do you have any other commercial xwindows software you can try?

This is unrelated to the slowness issue you are seeing, which we haven't reproduced or had reported. My hunch here is that it is connection related.

[Chris]

The blank dialog issue appears to be a bug in Cygwin/X. When I tested a connection to a CentOS 7 machine using VcXsrv, it displayed dialogs correctly instead of drawing them blank.

VcXsrv: https://sourceforge.net/projects/vcxsrv/