Re: PXES RDP Speed

On Thu, 2004-12-16 at 14:07 -0700, Pickup, Jordan wrote:
> We have been using PXES for quite a while. Recently, we have begun
> converting some users from using the Microsoft RDP client on top of
> Windows XP, to straight PXES computers.
> 
>  
> 
> For the most part, this is going really well. Our main problem of the
> moment is speed.

This isn't a problem with PXES, but rather with the rdesktop
implementation.  Honestly, there isn't much anyone can really do to
speed things up and here's why.

Microsoft's RDP client does not grab the screen and draw it.  Instead,
it sends GDI calls to the client, which the client interprets and
displays using its own local GDI.  This makes for amazing speed, as
rather than sending a bitmap of a box, or even instructions on how to
draw the box, it simply sends something more like DrawBox(800x600) to
the client.  This makes communications blistering fast.  The rdesktop
client, on the other hand, has to take every single command, translate
it into X calls, and execute them.  There is a noticeable delay in doing
this.

I would suggest switching to XFree86 4.3 in PXES and using RDPv5 (if you
aren't already) to gain some slight speed increases.  I have also found
that rdesktop compiled from CVS tends to run quite a bit faster than the
1.3.1 release.

-- 
Chris Gianelloni
Release Engineering - Operational/QA Manager
Games - Developer
Gentoo Linux

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