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My results
Authored by: victory on Feb 02, '05 02:30:01PM

I just thought I'd chime in with my experience with the aforementioned tip (using the native Mac RDC client to talk to a WinXP/2K host under VPC session running on the same machine).

I agree that the reasoning behind the argument sounds compelling -- it's an accepted fact that Microsoft's RDC uses a highly efficient protocol (that probably relies on sending Windows UI events rather than screen-painting with chunks of image data) to provide extremely responsive remote connections.

However, in my casual experiments using a 1GHz 17" PBG4 w/ 1Gb RAM, I didn't notice any significant speed increase. (More on this in a moment). My test environment includes VPC7 running WinXPPro on a 2Gb FAT32 drive container with guest PC settings: 256Mb RAM, background CPU usage set to full, and networking in 'virtual switch' mode.

I also messed with the connection speed settings under the RDC properties (WinXPPro) as well as various screen resolution/depth settings on both the client/host side. (e.g. set WinXPPro desktop to 640x480x256, but connect using a full 800x600x32k for the RDC terminal session, etc)

Regardless, I didn't get any overall better performance than a regular VPC session. It was interesting and a bit amusing to see it all working, but I doubt I'll be using this technique for the following reasons:

- As stated, I really didn't see any performance improvement. However, I'd like to suggest that I didn't really do extensive testing. Perhaps VPC on a G5, or increasing the RAM for the VPC session, or some other tweak, may improve the situation.

- If you're running any type of emulated server in a PC session and expect to connect to it from 'outside' VPC, you must use the 'Virtual Switch' network setting and manually set up the emulated OS as a separate network client on the same subnet that your Mac is on. That way OSX apps running alongside VPC are able to make network connections that loop back into the VPC session as if it were a separate host. The big downside is that it generally DOESN'T work if you're using a wireless connections as your primary network interface (a dialog box in VPC7 warns you if you try) and requires that you have a live Ethernet connection to a hub or switch. [on another VPC-related newsgroup, someone once suggested using RJ-45 loopback plug to achieve the same effect. Sounds like a terrible kluge to me] So while I did get it working, it wasn't exactly the most elegant solution since my PowerBook quite often has to change network addresses/interfaces when I go from site to site.

..

Anyhow, apologies for the long post and thanks to dcoyle for introducing the idea. I hope others have better luck with this technique. Clearly all of us are interested in anything that may improve VPC's performance.



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My results
Authored by: dcoyle on Feb 02, '05 11:59:46PM

I think results can vary wildly depending on the application. Probably the best indication of things speeding up for me was audio. Within VPC, hardly anything sounds good. Usually there is a very awful stutter that seems to be about the same rate you would expect from lots of VM paging. I've got 1GB of RAM - maybe not enough. Anyway, over RDC everything sounds smooth - about like VPC 1.0 ran on OS 9.
Dan



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