Hi,

I've recently been seeing a strange slow performance issue with the current RD Tabs.

I use RD Tabs on a Windows Server 2008 Enterprise OS with all the Vistaness enabled and it been like that for a number of years. Only recently has RD Tabs been much slower than RDC in rendering the same remote machine (in comparison, not at the same time!).

RD Tabs and RDC both connect to the remote machine (Windows XP Pro SP3) over an SSH Tunnel. The SSH server is running on another PC with a VPN connection to work as the VPN client needs to be run on a work supplied PC. The destination for the SSH Tunnel is an IP address at work.

I have a fast ISP connection (50Mbit Downstream/1.6Mb Upstream Cable service). I've checked the peak data rate on my router and its no more than 400-500Kbit/s when updating the desktop, show/hide Start menu bar etc.

Both the RDC Connection profile and the RD Tabs favorite enable the same User Experience options (LAN 10Mbps or Higher), but the RD Tabs rendering is blocky and slow. Moving remote windows around is painful - move the window and wait a second or two for it to update the screen - and Outlook 2007 can sometimes end up in a mess when the view panel wont show an e-mail - just remains blank, especially after switching tabs on RD Tabs. Also after a couple of disconnect/reconnect attempts seemed to cause mmc.exe to peg at 40-50% CPU ... no sure why mmc.exe on the remote machine was even running anything.

Apart from that one off instance of seeing mmc.exe running and consuming one core's work of CPU on the remote machine, there don't seem to be any CPU spikes on the host or remote machine.

Sorry if there's little to go on, but maybe others have seen a similar issue.

The only main change, which would affect both RD Tabs and RDC, is the VPN Client now being used. Previously it was Nortel CVC, but since I'm now working for Avaya Inc. our site network has just finally been switched over to Avaya's network - the core network in the office though is the same. I've tried a couple of VPN connection methods, VPNRemote (a similar standalone IPSEC based VPN Client using Juniper Networks, like Nortel CVC using their/our Contivity VPN Servers) and the SSL VPN access via a remote access web page. Both suffered the same slowdown when using RD Tabs compared to using RDC.

I read a similar post regarding Win 7 64Bit where the author referred to a Cisco router affecting performance. But as you said, RD Tabs uses the same core COM server/service as RDC.

I look forward to your thoughts,

Cheers
Mr A

During this evening there must have been some network maintenance of some sort at work.

Once the dropout cleared the data rate seem to back to a very acceptable level meaning the performance of RD Tabs improved massively. So, even though the screen updates are totally usable, it seems that RD Tabs suffered more than RDC while the data rate was low. Does RD Tabs have any buffering or timers that aren't coping - it can't be the core RDP COM server as that would impact RDC too?

So I guess not such a big issue now.

Also, I found that I could use the SSL VPN access (via a remote access web page) on my Server 2K8 host. But it wasn't really workable as the softphone client needed to run where the VPN was, then there'd be another app - and before I knew it I would end up installing all the locally used work apps on to my own PC ...that's not going to happen and why I have a work laptop!

So, the SSH tunnel doesn't seem to affect performance in any noticeable way either.