Bandwidth Requirements for Screen Sharing 30" ACD

[hayduke]

Hi All - I'm trying to get set-up to better work from home on occasion. I have a 30" ACD on a Mac Pro at work and a 27" LED ACD at home on a 2009 MBA. I'd like to be able to screen share my office desktop at home with little lag and at nearly full resolution and low screen refresh latency.

What kind of upload (from work) and download (at home) bandwidths do I need to be able to do this well? Any recommendations? I can get them to tweak my work settings and I can pay for more at home. Right now I'm at ~10/2MBs down/up at home and ~10/2MBs down/up at work too, but there is noticeable lag in the remote refresh, especially when switching apps (i.e. large screen appearance changes).

I'm using the native Screen Sharing app, but would consider something else if people have a suggestion.

Thoughts?

[Matty-p]

Originally Posted by hayduke

Hi All - I'm trying to get set-
up to better work from home on occasion. I have a 30" ACD on a Mac Pro at work and a 27" LED ACD at home on a 2009 MBA. I'd like to be able to screen share my office desktop at home with little lag and at nearly full resolution and low screen refresh latency.

What kind of upload (from work) and download (at home) bandwidths do I need to be able to do this well? Any recommendations? I can get them to tweak my work settings and I can pay for more at home. Right now I'm at ~10/2MBs down/up at home and ~10/2MBs down/up at work too, but there is noticeable lag in the remote refresh, especially when switching apps (i.e. large screen appearance changes).

I'm using the native Screen Sharing app, but would consider something else if people have a suggestion.

Thoughts?

well firstly you won't need to upgrade your home connection (all you need at home is a download speed at least as fast as works upload speed) so you shouldn't need to buy anything . btw is work a dedicated line and if so do you have internal trafic shaping?

the 30 acd has a res of 2560 x 1600 your home screen is 2560 by 1440. could you post your screen sharing settings and display settings at work?

Also how dose your mba connect to the internet e.g wifi,ethernet,3g,4g,ect and what dose your home network map look like (basically)?

also you say 10/2MBs down/up at home thats pretty fast at home and relitively slow for work (i dunno location and size of ofice and buget and need are also factors i don't know) just to be clear do you mean megabits or megabytes a second (this is crucial) if you dont know post screen shots from speedtest.net . also is home a dedicated or shared line? i assume shared??

also what's your ping

and actual home and work conection speed

[BertyBoy]

Watching this closely. I have several differences, using ARD to control a selection of Macs, some with 23in ACD, some headless. With 100Mb/s LAN connectiity, it's bearable, Gb/s is very usable. Do all the usual tricks, turning off fancy screen savers, desktop pictures, etc.

I tried it many years ago on a 2Mb/s line from about 600 miles away. I had to change it to B&W to have anything suitable for working in. And it was still painful.

[belvdr]

VNC just isn't a good choice for real usability, unless you have good speeds. 2Mb isn't good enough. You're going to notice lag.

[hayduke]

Originally Posted by Matty-p

well firstly you won't need to upgrade your home connection (all you need at home is a download speed at least as fast as works upload speed) so you shouldn't need to buy anything . btw is work a dedicated line and if so do you have internal trafic shaping?

Agreed, but the question remains what is the "required" bandwidth? In principle I can upgrade either up or down from home or my office.

Originally Posted by Matty-p

the 30 acd has a res of 2560 x 1600 your home screen is 2560 by 1440. could you post your screen sharing settings and display settings at work?

I run both monitors at full resolution (of course!). I'm not aware of any screen sharing settings on the work machine that are relevant. Maybe you can point me in the right direction. Screen sharing is, of course, "on" in System Preferences. Once I connect to the remote machine from home, I'm trying to run: Screen Sharing-->View-->Full Quality and Screen Sharing-->View-->Turn Scaling Off. (possibly "on" due to the resolution asymmetry).

Originally Posted by Matty-p

Also how dose your mba connect to the internet e.g wifi,ethernet,3g,4g,ect and what dose your home network map look like (basically)?

Wired or wireless the up/down speed is the same, which is to say my provider/service-level is the bottle neck. Yes, I've tested this.

Originally Posted by Matty-p

also you say 10/2MBs down/up at home thats pretty fast at home and relitively slow for work (i dunno location and size of ofice and buget and need are also factors i don't know) just to be clear do you mean megabits or megabytes a second (this is crucial) if you dont know post screen shots from speedtest.net . also is home a dedicated or shared line? i assume shared??

MBs not Mbs. I'm fortunate to have Verizon FIOS. That is the *slowest* service they offer! Actually, the service is supposed to be 15/5 but I don't get that from my Time Capsule that is wired to their router.

The line is shared with my wife and kids, but they aren't high bandwidth users (yet!).

Originally Posted by Matty-p

also what's your ping

and actual home and work conection speed

Ping? Not sure what you mean. My IP address so you can ping me? How can you use that?

Also, not sure what you mean by "actual" connection speeds. At work I am supposedly on a gigabit backbone and Cat6 wiring, but the speed is clearly slower than that. At home, as I said above the provider is at 15/5 and I'm running a 802.11b/g wireless network, but also have Cat6 wiring available for this project.

Thanks for any help. I guess what I was hoping to learn was that if I had 10MBs down (for example) at home and 10MBs up at work I'd be in good shape.

[hayduke]

Originally Posted by belvdr

VNC just isn't a good choice for real usability, unless you have good speeds. 2Mb isn't good enough. You're going to notice lag.

Is there something better than VNC? Again, I can upgrade beyond 2Mbps, but to what? That is the question.

[hayduke]

Argh. Sorry sorry sorry. All units are Mbps (bits!). My bad.

[Matty-p]

Originally Posted by hayduke

Hi All - I'm trying to get set-up to better work from home on occasion. I have a 30" ACD on a Mac Pro at work and a 27" LED ACD at home on a 2009 MBA. I'd like to be able to screen share my office desktop at home with little lag and at nearly full resolution and low screen refresh latency.

What kind of upload (from work) and download (at home) bandwidths do I need to be able to do this well? Any recommendations? I can get them to tweak my work settings and I can pay for more at home. Right now I'm at ~10/2MBs down/up at home and ~10/2MBs down/up at work too, but there is noticeable lag in the remote refresh, especially when switching apps (i.e. large screen appearance changes).

I'm using the native Screen Sharing app, but would consider something else if people have a suggestion.

Thoughts?

Originally Posted by hayduke

Agreed, but the question remains what is the "required" bandwidth? In principle I can upgrade either up or down from home or my office.

well its hard to say example i stream 1080*1920 over a 256 megabyte/s up conection at work and and 256 megabyte/s down at home it 2 megabits up and 2 megqabits down so a 2 megabit conection. but the key factor/s that make this work well on so little bandwith is 2 things dedecated conections at both ends and low latency as both are on cat5e gigabit networks physically and close to the switch and router. and that router is not far away from the kingston datacentre where the leger is to and my trafic is routed.

now if you upgrade to 10 megabytes/s up this will solve most of the problem but it is cheap bandwith and you using wireless at home. this makes latency not so great so you may see lag.

just fyi here's the definition of a dedicated conection- it basically means that it is not shared if you get a 15/5 from verizion you will be sharing this with a bunch of people in your street meaning you see speeds that are far less than this and speed can vary so if joe down the street is downloading a movie your speed will drop to really slow. dedecated basically mens nobody shres it and you usually has better latency and include static ip's mainly for bisiness. a upto 20mb line in the uk will cost £120 setup and £10 a month. a dedecated line of 20mb will cost £12,000 and cost £1000 a month.

you can get this working better then by either getting a faster line at work or negotiate and get it changed to an uplink as a pose to a downlink also use cable cat6 at home instead of wifi.

Originally Posted by hayduke

I run both monitors at full resolution (of course!). I'm not aware of any screen sharing settings on the work machine that are relevant. Maybe you can point me in the right direction. Screen sharing is, of course, "on" in System Preferences. Once I connect to the remote machine from home, I'm trying to run: Screen Sharing-->View-->Full Quality and Screen Sharing-->View-->Turn Scaling Off. (possibly "on" due to the resolution asymmetry).

scaling on ,quality down if you can

Originally Posted by hayduke

Wired or wireless the up/down speed is the same, which is to say my provider/service-level is the bottle neck. Yes, I've tested this.

do the same test but with latency you may find it nealy the same or way out depending on wireless setup

Originally Posted by hayduke

MBs not Mbs. I'm fortunate to have Verizon FIOS. That is the *slowest* service they offer! Actually, the service is supposed to be 15/5 but I don't get that from my Time Capsule that is wired to their router.

ive explained why above

Originally Posted by hayduke

The line is shared with my wife and kids, but they aren't high bandwidth users (yet!).

ive explained above

Originally Posted by hayduke

Ping? Not sure what you mean. My IP address so you can ping me? How can you use that?

ok sorry sould have explained terminal>ping www.google.com
now tell me ping ms
now > terminal>ping (ip adress of work machine)
tell me results

Originally Posted by hayduke

Also, not sure what you mean by "actual" connection speeds. At work I am supposedly on a gigabit backbone and Cat6 wiring, but the speed is clearly slower than that. At home, as I said above the provider is at 15/5 and I'm running a 802.11b/g wireless network, but also have Cat6 wiring available for this project.

actual conection speeds ie what you actually get to the net not what verizion claim


Edit ahh mbits thought that was a pretty fast conection! ok well the same as in my post applies ie cable at home and up grade up speed at work to 10 megabits up

[Matty-p]

Originally Posted by hayduke

Is there something better than VNC? Again, I can upgrade beyond 2Mbps, but to what? That is the question.

vnc is a program similar to screen sharing but cross platform and opensource

[mulo]

Originally Posted by Matty-p

vnc is a program similar to screen sharing but cross platform and opensource

FAIL
Screen Sharing in Mac OS is VNC

When I'm accessing a friend of mines mac thats hooked up to his tv (1920x1080) I'm always downloading at roughly 8mbit/s. When watching a movie or whatever he caps my download at 15mbit/s
(he has 90/90, I have 15/15)

Since your screens are what 2560x1440, I'd suggest at least a 20/20 connection, both at your house and office, for smooth access.
There are of course other factors to take into account.

[Matty-p]

Originally Posted by mulo

FAIL
Screen Sharing in Mac OS is VNC

that makes sense now!! i don't really us screen sharing that much on my mac i tend to use rd on ubuntu or w7

[Mac_Max]

I've done screen sharing via iChat over two 3.0Mb/512kb connections and it seems to work pretty well on anything less than 1440x900. My friend had a 12Mb/3Mb connection and on his iMac and we were able to screen share 1680 without much lag.

Lets say that you want to stream a 2MP sized image (i.e. 1920x1080 screen resolution). Thats about 500KB per second (assuming nominal JPEG type compression) which means you need an upload of 4.0Mb/s upload, plus some room for overhead. Granted, VLC does some things to lower that (like sending only the pixels that change) but if you're moving a normal sized window, thats what... 2/3 of 2MP or about 2.6Mb/s. In the case above with my friend, he had a 3Mb connection and we were usually sending no more than 2.3Mb or so of data to my computer.