Not faster than VNC in my experience [LWN.net]

Not faster than VNC in my experience

Posted Jul 30, 2005 6:07 UTC (Sat) by hofhansl (guest, #21652)
Parent article: The Arrival of NX, Part 1 (Linux Journal)

I installed FreeNX a few weeks ago, and I found responsivenes not better than VNC over a compressed SSH tunnel. In fact VNC over compressed SSH seemed slightly faster.

Hence I don't quite understand the hype.

(Log in to post comments)

Much faster than VNC, RDP and X in my experience

Posted Jul 30, 2005 11:50 UTC (Sat) by kobserver (guest, #30087) [Link]

Unfortunately you do not specify the network conditions nor the hardware
you used to run your tests. Could you elaborate, please?

If you run it in your LAN, and if you use an "old" hardware (whose slow
CPU could proof to be the bottleneck which can't keep up with the
constant encryption/decryption _plus_ NX-specific
compression/decompression going on), and if you use certain session
settings -- then indeed the experience could be that it is not much of an
improvement.

You have to run it over a dialup modem, or ISDN, or DSL to feel the
dramatic improvement indeed.

Hence I *do* understand the hype and support it.

Much faster than VNC, RDP and X in my experience

Posted Jul 30, 2005 21:08 UTC (Sat) by hofhansl (guest, #21652) [Link]

I've had DSL (slow with only 192kbit) and Cable (fast 3mbit) at home and use my machine from work (about 40mi away, broadband obviously). And yes, my home machine is quite powerful, so that I do mind to run the VNC Server (which is nothing but another X server) on it.

I found the key to better responsiveness was to use SSH Compression.

So, anyway, you use the best tool for the job, no need to evangalize over it (not saying you did...). For all of my usage patterns I found VNC/SSH-Compression to be superior.

Not faster than VNC in my experience

Posted Jul 30, 2005 19:25 UTC (Sat) by sbergman27 (subscriber, #10767) [Link]

I have used NX and several flavors of VNC and my experience has been that NX consistently blows VNC out of the water. On a LAN maybe it would not be noticeable. But over any sort of WAN connection, or over a modem connection, the difference is absolutely AMAZING. Over a 512k connection, with no loss of color depth, the responsiveness is so close to that of being on the console that it's hard to tell the difference.