Simple speed-up tips for Apple Remote Desktop and VNC

Jul 17, '06 07:30:00AM

Contributed by: giulio

I've found two things you can do to speed up Apple Remote Desktop and also VNC:

  1. Set the desktop background to a flat color on the client. This may be obvious, but you get much better image compression with less complex images.
  2. Set the client's depth to the same depth as the viewer. Use thousands instead of millions (if you want color). When I had the client (G4 677 TiPB) set to millions and the viewer to thousands, the session was not much slower than if the viewer was also in millions. I think this is because the client has to convert from millions to thousands, dither, and only then, send the bits. Putting both the client and viewer to thousands gave me a decent speed boost, since the client had no extra work to do.
If you have a pretty beefy client, you might not notice the increase as much as I did...

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