[rdesktop-users] Performance problems with rdesktop

[Austin S. <te...@of...>]

	I have a lab of 300Mhz or so PII machines which I'm connecting to
a modern (2.6Ghz or so) windows 2003 server. The clients are running pxelinux
which I have hacked with differing versions of rdesktop, among other small
changes.
	The network is switched Gigabit/Fast Ethernet. 

	The problem I've been running into is that one of the applications in
the lab does some simple, low color cartoon-like animation. I've expected the
frame rate to be not that great, but it seems to be really really awful - like
2 or 3 frames per second, which drops off to one frame every several seconds
after a few seconds. Setting to 8 bit color has improved this situation
somewhat, but the lab users are complaining that the computers are slower now
than when they were stand alone 286s.

	Has anyone else seen this sort of behavior? How would one go about 
diagnosing it? Any suggestions for performance improving tweaks?

	One of the things I've considered is that there is some tiny amount
of packet loss during this time, or perhaps that the amount of data is too
much even for switched fast ether.

	But I feel like I'm missing something really obvious. Though I was
able to find a page where someone managed to run doom via RDP
(with FAR better performance than I'm seeing), I can't find even one
page on the entire web where someone has commented on any sort of poor
performance with their rdp clients not related to server load or the like.

	My hope is that someone might respond with something like "yeah,
I've had a similar experience, where I saw similar behavior and found
by doing X that it was much improved". Otherwise the next step is trying
to figure out where any packets might be disappearing, or trying to profile
terminal services- I don't know, I'm sort of at a loss.

	One thing I've considered is that the rdp protocol's idea of
compression is somewhat laughable rle. I might be able to augment this using
rdp2vnc - which I was able to compile with cygwin. However, I couldn't get it
to work at all while testing from a home windows machine. Does anyone actually
use this any more? I can't find any notes even via google that show anyone as
having even commented on its existence in the last couple years.

	We're currently running rdesktop 1.3.1.

	Tons of thanks in advance for any non-rtfm suggestions.

	Austin