Question
How do I make LapLink Secure VNC go faster?
Answer
We find LapLink Secure VNC to be perfectly acceptable as our normal method of accessing desktops on
a daily basis. There are several things that can slow any LapLink Secure VNC session down, however,
and you may like to consider these if you find it too slow:
- Unusually 'busy' desktops. The LapLink Secure VNC protocol is very efficient at rendering areas
of a single color, such as you generally find on window title bars, scrollbars, backgrounds of
pages etc. But if, for example, you have pretty 24-bit photographs of your girlfriend as your
screen background, or dithered title-bars on your windows, you may pay a price for the aesthetics.
A colorful or patterned desktop background will probably slow down LapLink Secure VNC more than any
other single factor.
- Hi-color desktops. Don't use 24-bit color if you can use 16 or 8 equally well. If you regularly
connect to a remote LapLink Secure VNC server, consider whether you could run happily at lower
resolution. A 1280x1024 screen has more then 4 times as many pixels as a 640x480 one, and if all
you are doing is checking a printer queue you probably don't need them all! Note, though, that on
LapLink Secure VNC, 16-bit color is usually the best to use.
- Elderly graphics cards or drivers may make quite a difference; this is a graphics-intensive
application! On Windows the graphics system on the server will affect the speed as well as the one
on the viewer.
- Some applications are not very economical about redrawing their display.
- If you are connecting to LapLink Secure VNC, don't change the default settings in the
Properties box unless you need to.
- Generally, with LapLink Secure VNC, use 16-bit color (65536 colors) on the server if you can.
16-bit is almost always the best depth to use, because:
- 256-color screens have to be palette-converted before they can be transmitted to truecolor
clients. Only if the client is 256-color palette- based will you see any performance increase. Even
if the client is 256 color truecolor, it'll have to convert via a 32-bit truecolor palette!
- 24-bit screens have to be specially munged via 32-bit since LapLink Secure VNC's internal
color-handling routines don't work with 24-bit directly.
- 24 and 32-bit screens have to have each pixel looked up in three tables to get the converted
value.
- Graphics cards claiming to do 24-bit often actually do 32-bit with munging - this in many cases
makes 24-bit slower just for general use than 32-bit!
- Finally, 16-bit involves no palette processing and a single lookup in a cached src_format to
dest_format table to convert the pixels.
Product: Secure VNC
KB: 30
Last updated: Apr 1, 2001
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