Slow Screen Sharing

Question

Level 4

1,587 points

Slow Screen Sharing

Hey all.

Some time ago it seems that Apple changed Apple Remote Desktop so that an overabundance of screen data pipes through from clients to the local host. The session becomes utterly slow and the fans ramp up on the local host because it's working so hard. Sessions with static screens are ok, but when there is motion video on the client systems, such as a screen saver, Time Machine or youtube the performance becomes terrible. Hosts with high resolution displays compound the problem.

I have encryption set to passwords and keystrokes only. Setting the display quality to B&W or grayscale makes no difference. So long as there is animation or motion video the session performance is terrible.

I am using a 2013 MacBook Pro Retina with 16-GB RAM.

Any suggestions?

Posted on Mar 31, 2015 11:21 AM

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Answer 1

jaredfs

Level 2

315 points

Apr 2, 2015 5:53 AM in response to iGary

I do not experience this problem with over 200 client devices in my RD administration. I wonder if there's something about your customizations that is compounding the slight stress that remote viewing adds to the processing power? I have only seen computers take a performance hit while remotely observed when they are already low on free RAM.

What configurations do your client machines have RAM-wise?

Have you tried sending the " sudo purge " command through the Unix Command first to try clearing up some memory for your remote session. Even still, remote viewing seems to take only a small amount of memory and processor power to run in my experience.

My setup by the way includes Clients with 4-16GB RAM and models from 1-5 years of age. My Admin console runs on a MacPro with 10.9 and ARD 3.7.5 and on my personal station, an iMac with 10.0 and ARD 3.8

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Answer 2

iGary Author

Level 4

1,587 points

Feb 3, 2016 9:44 AM in response to jaredfs

I finally stumbled into the solution - after a very long time of living with this.

The cause was some odd effect of FileVault 2 encryption. I've been encrypting my laptops with FileVault 2 since the days of Mountaion Lion and two laptopos ago. Don't know when this slow screen sharing issue appeared

However a couple of weeks ago I turned off FileVault so I could issue new Institutional and Individual keys. After turning off encrytion I immediately noticed this slow screen sharing issue disappeared. But it took me a couple of weeks to test the new keys, and I finally re-encrypted the drive yesterday. So far with the new FileVault 2 encryption my screen sharing performance is normal!

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Answer 3

Feb 4, 2016 6:24 AM in response to iGary

I experience this problem and it stinks. I also am using FileVault.

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Answer 4

iGary Author

Level 4

1,587 points

Feb 4, 2016 8:10 AM in response to Storm89161

Nothing more than speculation, but try to decrypt and check for any change. Then reencrypt. That's what worked for me.

I was probably running Mavericks when I last encrypted this drive and started to see this performance issue. Along the way upgraded to Yosemite with no change to this problem, and decrypted & reencrypted when runnigng Yosemite.

I upgraded to El Capitan yesterday and still the performance is normal.

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Answer 5

iGary Author

Level 4

1,587 points

Feb 22, 2017 3:46 PM in response to iGary

The problem did eventually return for me. However today with the release of the ARD 3.9.0 update the problem has gone away. Hopefully this time it's for good.

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