Hello, all. We were very eager to experiment with TSPlus (http://www.tsplus.net) as an alternative to Microsoft RDS. We have been assuming all along that performance of any RDP solution is better in a low bandwidth WAN environment if we put X2Go in the middle of it and run rdesktop from the X2Go Server to a local Windows server. Our results were very disappointing with both TSPlus and RDS and with both rdesktop and xfreerdp.
Has anyone else experienced the same poor performance or, more importantly, has anyone worked around it?
We noticed that screens seemed to be painting line by line - not sure if if it is the entire screen or just the active window. It also made mouse movements very erratic in TSPlus + rdesktop. TSPlus + xfreerdp seems better.
To demonstrate this, I opened notepad in a large window in a full screen session, typed an entire line, copied it to the clipboard and then held down <CTL>V to paste it. The first few lines flew but then it became very slow and we could see the flicker of each line painting.
I also opened Internet Explorer and went to www.spiritualoutreach.org - a very poorly designed site I put up years ago with long pages and far too large graphics. I sat and watched the screen paint a band at a time. I opened one of the large template documents and vertical scrolling was nearly impossible.
I'll paste in some of our internal notes below. Thanks - John
BEGIN NOTES Good afternoon, Phil. I've dropped an unexpected several hours into this this morning with some good, some bad news, and some inconclusive news. There is an alternative to rdesktop named freerdp which aims to implement the newer protocols as rdesktop is barely being developed. Last I used it, it was very lacking but I installed the current Squeeze version on my netbook and connected to windesk01 across the VPN (xfreerdp -d mydomain -u myid -a 32 -x lan -f --plugin cliprdr tsplusserver ). The results were stunning.
Performance was quite usable directly through the VPN, i.e, not using X2Go as an intermediary. The silly test I was using to see the line by line painting (opening a large notepad, typing a full line, copying it to the clipboard, and then holding down <CTL>V to continually paste it) worked quite well. I did the same thing to RDSServer where I had some large architectural drawing stashed and they scrolled largely seamlessly.
I then returned to my VD, installed freerdp-x11, and tried the same. The results were most disappointing - the same problems of slow, line by line painting. I also noticed that the full screen toggle (<ALT><CTL><ENTER>) mangled whereas directly on the VPN, it did not. I wonder of there is some sort of conflict between the way NX and RDP paint the screen?
I then tried the same thing using simply rdesktop. The performance over the VPN was better than I remembered. I also contrasted RDSServer and tsplusserver. I'm not sure but it is possible that TSPlus is actually getting heat for something they are doing well. The line by line screen painting in my notepad test was much more noticeable in TSPlus but the overall performance was about the same. I wonder if TSPlus is painting the screen faster and so we see the repaints whereas RDS is hiding them by not updating the screen as quickly. I don't know - just a thought.
I'm continuing to play around with this quite a bit. In fact the above paragraph was typed from a direct full screen Windows desktop via X2Go. This paragraph is being typed across the VPN directly on tsplusserver using xfreerdp. The keyboard response seems about the same.
For kicks, I opened KWrite on my Trinity desktop and tried the same pasting test to see if the screen painting was line by line. It was not; it flew. So it is something in the interaction between RDP and NX.
To create the X2Go direct Windows session, create new sessions (one for tsplusserver and the other for RDSServer). The type should be Custom Desktop (NOT single application) with the command line as described above). Remember to set the compression type to 16m-png-jpeg and the display DPI. I'll be very curious to see what you see. END NOTES