Lately I’ve run into a problem while doing maintenance on a remote server. When I connect to the remote server via rdesktop on my Fedora 11 desktop, The windows move extremely slow and it appears that the system is taking a long time to respond to my commands.
After doing much research, it looks like the problem is with the new RDPv6 that shipped with Windows Vista, and 7. Apparently this server 2003 box was updated with this new RDP verison which has some new bandwidth negotiation features, that cause RDPv5 clients to perform horribly as I experienced today.
UPDATE – The version of RDP seems to have nothing to do with the slow performance I or others have experienced lately. Just last week the same server which was horrendously laggy when using remote desktop, is now lag free and very responsive via remote desktop. At this point I am guessing that it has something to do with saturated networks or bigfoot! (LOL), only mere mortals can guess why M$ servers decide to work.
To check your RDP version do the following:
1. Got to Start -> Run
2. Type “mstsc” then press enter
3. The Remote Desktop Connection Window will then appear
4. Right click on the title bar, then select about
5. In the about window look for “shell version” and that will tell you the RDP version number. In this example below the RDP verion is 5.2.
Solution:
The only way I was able to get around the ridiculously slow performance in rdesktop, was to use a windows machine with an updated RDP client. Once I used a up to date client, the performance issues dissapeared. I’ve searched linux forums and other sites to see if rdesktop has been updated to RDPv6 but have not found anything yet. I know this isn’t ideal but for now it seems to be the only way untill another solution is found.
References:
http://blog.tmcnet.com/blog/tom-keating/microsoft/remote-desktop-slow-problem-solved.asp
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Thank you for this. I ran into the same problem yesterday — noticed that my tsclient+rdesktop connection from the Ubuntu Jaunty side of my computer was a lot slower than the Remote Desktop Connection from the Win XP Pro side, to the same Windows Server 2003 machine.
I had a hard time finding any explanations for the difference. My issue isn’t even that the server had been updated to RDPv6. Even with version 5.2 — by coincidence, down to exactly the same build that you’re illustrating above — Jaunty’s rdesktop performs noticeably worse than mstsc.exe in Win XP Pro SP3.
Glad you found this post useful! I agree that the problem seems to not be with RDPv6 at the moment since, rdesktop in fedora 11 and 12 seem to be experiencing the same horrible performance even if the server has RDP v5 installed.
It might be a bug in rdesktop or a problem with that particular build of RDP on the server. At this point I’ll have to take a deeper look since it appears to only be affecting 3 servers in particular whils the others work fine.
Good Luck!