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You are here: MacNN Forums > Software - Troubleshooting and Discussion > macOS > VNC into Leopard from Windows over Internet is unusable

VNC into Leopard from Windows over Internet is unusable
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milhous
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Jul 28, 2009, 07:48 AM
 
I've tried my best in figuring this out for months, but I've essentially given up.

VNC performance is flat out unacceptable over the Internet regardless if it's a direct connection or through an SSH tunnel (preferred method for obvious for security purposes). At work, we have a 100MB fiber connection to the Internet. At home, I'm on cable that's currently doing 15Mb Down, 2Mb Up.

I've tried different VNC clients, different protocols, different color depths, etc without much success. While the screen redraws are acceptable, the screen doesn't refresh fast enough when I want to interact with it which leads to me having to request a screen refresh with almost every action.

Granted, it's a 1920x1200 screen that I'm controlling, but I run it at the lowest color depth and it still doesn't refresh fast enough.

If Apple released a Windows OS X client similar to Microsoft's Remote Desktop Connection, I would buy it immediately.

Thoughts?
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shifuimam
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Jul 28, 2009, 08:01 AM
 
Are you using Apple's built in "remote desktop" functionality, or have you tried other VNC server options?

I use Vine VNC on my 733MHz G4, and it works just fine for me. It's not as fast as RDP - Windows remote desktop uses a proprietary protocol that's just better than VNC for frequent remote administration/use of a machine - but it works.

I use the TightVNC client from Windows to VNC into my Mac. If you haven't tried Vine as your VNC server, give a shot and see how it performs.
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milhous  (op)
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Jul 28, 2009, 08:43 AM
 
Sorry, I should've qualified. I am using Vine and running it as a service.
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besson3c
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Jul 28, 2009, 12:26 PM
 
You definitely need to try NoMachine (nxclient/nxserver). It is much faster than both VNC and X11 forwarding, and now Google has released their own nxserver client as well.
     
slugslugslug
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Jul 28, 2009, 12:56 PM
 
Originally Posted by besson3c View Post
You definitely need to try NoMachine (nxclient/nxserver). It is much faster than both VNC and X11 forwarding, and now Google has released their own nxserver client as well.
This sounds really cool, but now I just wound up with a million new tabs open without figuring out how to run the server on a Mac. Do you have any experience with that?
     
besson3c
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Jul 28, 2009, 01:14 PM
 
Sorry, it looks like only the client is available for OS X at this time, and Google's NeatX is compile only right now. Unless you have any luck looking into tunneling and compression (which you get in NXServer/client for free), I think you're SOL. What did you want to do on OS X anyway? Maybe we can come up with alternatives...
     
slugslugslug
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Jul 28, 2009, 01:28 PM
 
I just want to do what it seems the OP wants: to control my home Mac from a work Windows PC without a maddeningly slow refresh rate.
     
besson3c
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Jul 28, 2009, 01:41 PM
 
I can't think of a way to increase your refresh rates short of throwing more bandwidth at the problem or exploring compression. If you just need to access some files or something, there are a variety of other alternatives, and there is always your Unix shell too.
     
slugslugslug
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Jul 28, 2009, 02:26 PM
 
I wonder what extra tricks Apple has up its sleeve with Leopard Screen Sharing then. I was under the impression that it's built on top of VNC, but I got way better responsiveness using that last spring when I got to use a Mac.
     
ibook_steve
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Jul 28, 2009, 02:36 PM
 
I like LogMeIn. Not sure if it works cross-platform, though.

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tooki
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Jul 28, 2009, 05:17 PM
 
Originally Posted by milhous View Post
Granted, it's a 1920x1200 screen that I'm controlling, but I run it at the lowest color depth and it still doesn't refresh fast enough.
Don't do that! Because Mac OS X's entire display model is based on 32-bit color, it actually slows things down when you use a lower color depth, because Mac OS X renders as 32 bit internally, and then dithers the image to the reduced color depth. The dithering is massively less efficient to compress than the original 32 bit image.

At work, we use BeamYourScreen, and we've used it with a Mac before and it seemed OK.
     
milhous  (op)
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Jul 28, 2009, 07:12 PM
 
Thank you, the dithering part was insightful.

Yeah I know there are alternatives such as logmein, webex, gotomypc.com, etc. But they're all block from our proxy at work (mobileme included). Fortunately as a sysadmin, I can still outbound SSH to my MBP at home and I like doing it that way since it's under the radar.

Unfortunately, I think the only way to address this optimally will be for Apple to release its own client that can accelerate the desktop. Either that, or buying a Mac for work to use the native Screen Sharing client, which should offer a better experience and use the native VNC server instead of Vine.
F = ma
     
   
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