why is screen sharing so slow?

Question

why is screen sharing so slow?

I have mac mini connected to the TV via HDMI and use a bluetooth keyboard to interact with it directly (no mouse). I would like to interact with it via screensharing from my macbook air (both running latest version of Mavericks). However, ever since I upgraded to Mavericks screensharing (or remote management) is so slow it has become impossible to use. When I use the bluetooth keyboard, the TV updates pretty fast (although still with a noticable lag) but the shared screen on my macbook air is lagging behind by many seconds!

I read the various discussions about modified dongles, firewalls, power saver settings and tried all that (except for the dongle).

Did Mavericks simply break screen sharing? Or is there some (command line) setting I could use to fix this? Would OS X Server work better?

Mac mini, OS X Mavericks (10.9.3)

Posted on May 20, 2014 11:24 AM

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Answer 1

BDAqua

Level 10

238,691 points

May 20, 2014 5:24 PM in response to carlosmaltzahn

What all 3rd party extentions are you running?

EtreCheck is a simple little app to display the important details of your system configuration and allow you to copy that information to the Clipboard. It is meant to be used with Apple Support Communities to help people help you with your Mac.

http://www.etresoft.com/etrecheck

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Answer 2

May 21, 2014 6:03 AM in response to carlosmaltzahn

One thing to be aware of is that while a Mac is connected to a working monitor or TV the monitor/TV sends a signal to the Mac which causes the Mac to know there is something there and this causes the Mac to enable and use its video card. If you remote control a Mac when there is no monitor/TV connected or it is powered off then the video chip will not be enabled. If the video chip is not enabled then this will slow down ScreenSharing as the video processing will instead be done in software.

For what its worth there are other remote control packages available, Timbuktu Pro, LogMeIn, TeamViewer, etc. and these may (or may not) be faster.

As you are using a TV and maybe also an AV receiver I could imagine you may often have the TV turned off but still want to be able to remote control the Mac and therefore might hit the above problem. For this and other reasons commonly experienced when using a Mac with a TV that gets turned off, I suggest you consider busing one of the following.

http://www.gefen.com/kvm/ext-hdmi-edidp.jsp?prod_id=8005

or

http://www.gefen.com/kvm/ext-hd-edidpn.jsp?prod_id=14859

I have the older (first listed) version of the above. It appears the difference is that the second one lets you cheat and change the EDID values overriding what the TV itself says.

The above HDMI Detective Plus devices will 'learn' the signal from the TV and keep sending it to the Mac even when the TV is turned off or unplugged. Therefore the Mac will keep its video chip enabled all the time.

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Answer 3

Apr 30, 2016 7:04 PM in response to carlosmaltzahn

This still on-going bug (a year later) in OSX is not likely to be fixed the two not great work arounds are:

1. Make a build a faked dongle to trick OSX to by pass this bug.
http://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/152354/screensharing-slow-even-over-gig abit-ethernet

2. Turn off OSX screen sharing and install your own VNC server

http://www.tightvnc.com/

https://www.realvnc.com/download/

I have also seen some people resolve this by buying OSX Server ( $20 ) from the app store.

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Answer 4

Apr 30, 2016 7:05 PM in response to carlosmaltzahn

This still on-going bug (two years later) in OSX is not likely to be fixed the two not great work arounds are:

1. Make a build a faked dongle to trick OSX to by pass this bug.
http://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/152354/screensharing-slow-even-over-gig abit-ethernet

2. Turn off OSX screen sharing and install your own VNC server

http://www.tightvnc.com/

https://www.realvnc.com/download/

I have also seen some people resolve this by buying OSX Server ( $20 ) from the app store.

Reply