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Comment by whalesalad | Hacker News Reader

How’s the experience of working on it? I’ve been struggling to get a decent remote setup even in my home lab due to network latency. Could be because I’m trying to drive 4K. Even Win10 RDP over a 1300mbps network struggles. I wonder if I need to bite the bullet and install a real graphics card in the R720.

Would love to hear more experiences of others who remote this way where you are “offloading” your compute power elsewhere.

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I saw you wrote that you don't think the network is your problem, but it could be. The 1300mbps and UniFI makes me think you are using a wireless connection, and those often deliver much lower bandwidth than they should, and always have more latency than I expect.

Use a wired 1Gbps connection. If it works acceptably -- which it has in every single setting I've tried -- then it is your network, though it might not be where you usually look (e.g. speedtest measures your overall bandwidth, but if you have many retransmits, you might have horrible interactive experience even with sufficient bandwidth).

I should note the same thing happens while hardwired. I definitely wanted to rule it out.

Is your Ubiquiti box doing Deep Packet Inspection over your home network?

It might be frantically trying to look at every packet flying by.

I connect from Windows 10 client to a Windows 10 host using RDP driving dual 4K and it feels like native, though I mostly just use single 4K. This it’s my daily driver over a standard UK fibre to the cabinet (FTTC) connection client end to a gigabit connection host side.

I’m generally using office, internet, Windows terminals/ssh, IDEs etc. Very rarely an overly dramatic full page video advert will jolt me back to reality that I’m doing this over RDP.

You could try solutions oriented toward gaming like Parsec or Nvidia Gamestream with Moonlight. They use hardware acceleration for video encoding and may have better latency than RDP.

https://parsec.app/

https://moonlight-stream.org/

Don't these and Stadia use RDP under the hood?

Afaik for both Parsec and Moonlight the video is a capture of the screen encoded in h264 or h265 and streamed to the remote client. They may be based on RDP for input but I don't think that's the case.

Moonlight is open-source, you can see in the code yourself as I don't understand most of it. There is also a project that attempt to replace the associated Nvidia Gamestream server but it is quite basic and no longer maintained : https://github.com/loki-47-6F-64/sunshine

I work with RDP almost every day for several years now, hardly been a problem.

In fact just yesterday while I could easily connect with RDP, Slack was just dying when trying to share screens.

If you're trying to drive 4K, I would look at the power of the thin client, and maybe try putting a graphics card there, rather than in the server.

I'd also check your choice of RDP client -- are you using the official Microsoft client or a FOSS one? I believe there are extensions to RDP that basically wrap H.264, which you'd probably want at that resolution.

What switch/router is it going through? There's a lot of gigabit hardware that can't push gigabit speeds.

I have a totally over-engineered UniFi setup at home. I’m pretty confident the network is not the issue.

I experience the performance issues on the LAN, for instance, even with a 1,300mbps negotiated connection.

Ah, okay. And I guess you've already played with various group policy around compression, gpu acceleration (RemoteFX) , etc, for RDP.

RemoteFX is something I had not heard of - will take a look!

Do you even struggle with RDP when you're on the same network?

We also have an R720 at work, running a Windows Server 2016 under Hyper-V and it performs very poorly (Windows UI is super slow, etc.). I know next to nothing about physical servers, but I've had great success swapping HDDs for SSDs in laptops to dramatically increase Windows' modern UI's performance. Our R720 has HDDs instead of SSDs, I've thought of upgrading them to see how it works out.

If you ever find a solution, please let me know.

Yes! I am having the same issue, but I have a mixture of old school 10k SAS disks and a bunch of desktop grade SATA SSDs.

Windows performance on this machine is atrocious (virtualized in ESXI) whereas Linux is great.

RemoteFX will enable both GPU acceleration in apps as well as GPU acceleration in the RDP session encode but...

RDP is still only limited to 30 FPS for whatever reason and so you may continue to be disappointed in it.

Also 1,300 Mbps sounds like a wireless network so your main problem on the network side is being half duplex and airtime delays (even from just beacons) not throughput. I'd pick a 100 Mbps hardwire to RDP on over any Wi-Fi setup as the video bandwidth isn't actually that helpful but jitter/latency are problems with trying to send inputs at the same time. Not much you can do about that though.

Doesn't remote fx require special hardware/os on the host side?

Not really, OS wise it can't be Home edition but because Homedoesn't officially support hosting RDP at all. Hardware wise it requires basically "a gpu", even a low end decade old integrated Intel GPU will work.

Yeah my use case isn't really some sort of RDI farm, but just a way to access one of my existing machines which I also happen to use physically. For that use case RDP (without remotefx) works fine, but it doesn't look like setting up remotefx would be easy.

I think you might be reading about RemoteFX vGPU or something else in the RemoteFX family? If so that's a different thing than RemoteFX for RDP. The latter is literally just enabling a couple Group Policies in gpedit - otherwise it's exactly the same as running normal RDP.

Which group policies are you talking about? Are they the policies for enabling AVC encoding? eg.

https://admx.help/?Category=Windows_10_2016&Policy=Microsoft...

Every nerd knob for RDP host configuration can be found under this tree in the group policy editor https://i.imgur.com/PtN0fNt.png

The 2 you need to enable to just enable RemoteFX are "Use hardware graphics adapters for all Remote Desktop Service sessions" to Enabled and "RemoteFX for Windows Server 2008 R2/Configure RemoteFX" to "Enabled". These 2 should net you GPU acceleration in the remote session.

For GPU accelerated encoding you can also set "Configure H.264/AVC hardware encoding for Remote Desktop Connections" to "Enabled".

Those 3 policies are all I usually tick but the rest of the policies in that tree are nerd knob tunables with many relating to bandwidth/resource utilization/image quality tradeoffs if that so interests you.

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