WinVNC vs Remote Desktop

Hi Joel!

There is one more big difference between RD and VNC: RD transfers everything.

Just one example:
  if I start CityDesk remote with VNC I won't see the splash screen. VNC is just not fast enough to transfer it before it is gone again.
  if I start CityDesk with remote Desktop the splash screen will be transmitted. Pixel for Pixel, taking ages.

This will get even worse when you accidently start a movie, game or something.

just my 2 cents

Sam Jost
Sunday, October 20, 2002

An alternative for VNC is Remote Administrator (http://www.radmin.com). It works faster, much more reliable and it's quite cheap.

Frederik Slijkerman
Monday, October 21, 2002

But VNC (or other tools like it) are good when you need to work in the cosole session, not a new one. For example, my home jukebox PC which plays music and DivX movies cannot be controlled by Terminal Server, because I need tobe in the same session that is displayed in the TV screen.

If I don't care about sessions - of course it is much better to use VNC-like tools.

Roman Eremin
Monday, October 21, 2002

Correction: If I don't care about sessions - of course it is much better to use Terminal Services.

Roman Eremin
Monday, October 21, 2002

You might take a look at TightVNC at  http://sourceforge.net/projects/vnc-tight .  It features reduced data transmission (partially through better compression).  We've had good luck with it.

Mark Morga
Monday, October 21, 2002

that's what we use; it's marginally faster than VNC if you're willing to accept JPG artifacts, but still nowhere near as fast as terminal services.

Joel Spolsky
Monday, October 21, 2002

Why all the VNC bashing? It's meant to be portable, so they took the path of least resistance and just push pixels across the network. If they wanted performance similar to Terminal Services, they'd have to implement practically all of GDI *and* X11 and whatever other window systems they wanted to remote... If you are stuck on Windows use Terminal Services, otherwise VNC...

Dan
Tuesday, October 22, 2002

Another benefit of TightVNC (main site: http://www.tightvnc.com/ ): It transmits shift-arrow just fine (as well as mousewheel and other special input situations not handled by the "stock" VNC client and server).

dan sandler
Tuesday, October 22, 2002

Faster than TightVNC, at least on my servers, is to use SSH compression:

ssh -C -L 5905:vncserver:5900 sshserver

Then VNC to localhost:5.

Since I'm already using SSH, adding the -C is no big deal.

You have to turn off the "tight" protocol in your client or it will actually be slower (trying to compress what's already compressed).

Nate
Tuesday, October 22, 2002

Oh, I should mention my crude method of testing VNC speed:

Click Start » Log Off in Windows and see how long it takes to "dim" the entire screen.

Nate
Tuesday, October 22, 2002

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