Remote Desktop suddenly very slow

You can connect to a remote PC in the Full Control and View mode, but the connection is slow.

Possible solutions are listed below.

Remote Utilities is outdated or version mismatch

Make sure that you have installed the latest version of Viewer and Host. See Update Remote Utilities.

Version mismatch between Viewer and Host may lead to performance issues and some features not working.

Internet connection slow

The overall speed and performance are only as good as the slowest network segment between Viewer and Host. Even if there is a broadband hi-speed Internet connection on the Viewer side, a slow 3G or GPRS connection on the Host side may cause degraded performance regardless of the Host CPU power.

Direct connection vs. Internet-ID connection

A direct connection is faster than an Internet-ID connection. Whenever possible, connect directly to a remote PC. If the remote PC is behind a router, it is still possible to connect directly using the port forwarding technique.

Default Internet-ID server vs. Self-hosted server

If you use Internet-ID connection you can make it faster by switching to your own self-hosted server (RU Server). See Server Role—Relay.

High color depth

If remote connection is lagging, try lowering the color depth to 8- or 4-bit color. Go to connection properties, choose the Color and CPU tab and set the color depth.

Visual effects

To improve performance, turn off Windows Aero (Windows 7 only) and the wallpaper on the remote screen. Go to connection properties, choose the Additional properties tab and select Disable Aero and Remove wallpaper.

Economy mode

Go to connection properties, choose the Network tab and enable Economy mode. This can improve performance in certain circumstances.

Low-end or outdated CPU

Although there are no special hardware requirements for Remote Utilities, you need to run the software on a relatively modern PC with enough CPU power and RAM.

High CPU load

If you are running Remote Utilities on a computer with heavy CPU load, this may result in degraded performance. Remote Utilities needs CPU resources just like any other program.

You can tweak CPU usage for specific remote computer. Go to connection properties, choose the Color and CPU tab and drag the slider under CPU Usage to Low. If you want to manually set frames per second (FPS), drag the slider to FPS and select the FPS value in the dropdown list below.

Screen capture mode

Sometimes, changing the default screen capture mode can help:

1. On the Host side right-click the Host icon in the system tray and select Settings for Host.
2. Go to the Other tab and select Use legacy capture mode.
3. Right-click on the Host icon and select Restart Host or simply restart the Host PC.

If you use Remote Desktop (RDP) to connect to other computers on your network, you’ll want to speed up the process. Here’s how to configure optimal settings for a faster RDP experience.

Note: This should work with other versions of Windows and other operating systems you’re working with. Keep in mind your results will vary depending on the speed of your network and internet connection.

Speed Up Remote Desktop Session on Windows

After you have Remote Desktop enabled. Start a new RDP session and click Options.

Next, click the Display tab. Slide the Display Configuration to a smaller size. Under Colors, select High Color (16 bit).

Now click the Experience tab. Uncheck all of the settings to optimize performance. Or select Modem (56 Kbps) from the dropdown menu.

Select the computer you want to remote into and click Connect.

Your Remote Desktop session won’t look as glamorous as having the display settings turned up, but it will make for a faster and more fluid, and responsive experience.

This is especially handy on slower networks and older Windows systems.

Microsoft, remote-desktop, Windows, Windows 10, Windows 7

Hi Steve,

What's your configuration in Remote Desktop Connection\Exprience\Performance?

Try to change with "Detect connection quality automatically" or "Low speed broadband" to check again.

We also could try the following steps to configure the memory and network balance and check.

1. Logon to the Remote Desktop Services Session Host computer as an administrator 2. Start--Run gpedit.msc 3. In the left pane, under Computer Configuration, navigate to following: Administrative Templates\Windows Components\Remote Desktop Services\Remote Desktop Session Host\Remote Session Environment 4. In the right pane, double-click on Configure compression for RemoteFX data 5. Select Enabled, and choose Balances memory and network bandwidth

6. Click OK to save the change

Bests,

Please remember to mark the replies as answers if they help.
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So I am connecting to my work computer from home and the Remote Desktop Connection app is annoyingly slow.

I pinged my work pc from my computer and it returned at a reasonable time of 50ms~ with 0 loss. I then attempted to ping my home IP from the RDP session and it timed out every time. Not sure if this might help anyone come to a conclusion but hopefully it does. Note I am also using it in conjunction with Cisco AnyConnect Secure Mobility Client if that helps at all. Work is Windows 7 and Home is Windows 8

I attempted switching off my home pc's firewall but that did nothing.

Any assistance would be great, surely a setting in the RDP file might make it run a little smoother.

I'll edit this post with further attempts at fixes below

• It is probably your provider. The internet, in general, is getting crushed right now. TWC/Spectrum is just horrible in my area right now. Latency is about 15 times normal even on my DIA connections. 

• I was hoping this wasn't the reason, but you may be right...

• Adjusting the quality settings will help with the bandwidth used by the connection but not really the latency, which is more important on an RDP connection. 

  Can you test the latency between your connection and the where your VPN terminates? I would do a few traceroutes and see where the latency is coming from. If it is on the internet there is likely little anyone will do for you on the ISP side. At least you will know it is from the Internet and not something in your equipment that way. 

  Conversely, if the path between you and the termination point of the VPN is fine, you may start looking at something internal. Whether it be an overloaded VPN concentrator or home router or bad wifi signal etc. 

• All networks are being hammered even the cloud and streaming companies are affected.

  If you are on fiber or have less people on VPN then you are somewhat faster but bottlenecks will be a problem for the next 30 days...

  Happy computing from home!

• Can I test the latency just by pinging the remote computer?

• spicehead-r261t wrote:Can I test the latency just by pinging the remote computer?Yes but what Justin is saying is that you may gain insight as to the source of your latency. On your local computer do tracert to your vpn address. You could likely even tracert the remote machine itself but it’s tricky if the remote subnet uses the same private addresses . From your Remote Desktop, do a tracert to your home’s public IP address (you can ask Google “what’s my ip”)Do this a few times to get a sense of which hop may be the problem.

  If the lag is out in the big blue internet there is little else you can do.

• Alright I'll try that. Thanks all!

• spicehead-r261t wrote:

  - The latency is not limited to the program either; even opening the start menu takes 10 s or more.

  I have changed various RDT settings like the display color depth and the connection speed (currently set to modem 56 kbps) and have turned off persistent bit cacheing. It's now better than it was yesterday, when I was losing connection every few minutes, but it's still FAR slower than it has been.
  

  
  

  The answer may lies on the remote Workstation.....is the remote machine capable of running your GPU intensive applications on top of RDP ?

  What is the resource consumption when the lags happen ? Every tried rebooting the remote machine ?

  Instead of using RDP, ever considered PCoIP or remote managers like Teamviewer or splashtop etc to see if the issue persist ?

  
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• adrian_ych wrote:

  The answer may lies on the remote Workstation.....is the remote machine capable of running your GPU intensive applications on top of RDP ?

  What is the resource consumption when the lags happen ? Every tried rebooting the remote machine ?

  Instead of using RDP, ever considered PCoIP or remote managers like Teamviewer or splashtop etc to see if the issue persist ?

  Thanks for highlighting Splashtop.  Splashtop Business Access is a high performance remote access solution and fully optimized to support NVIDIA/AMD/Intel GPU and chipset.  As Splashtop comes with 2FA, device authen and TLS/SSL encryption, there is actually no need to have VPN which tends to be a bottleneck as well.  VPNs are known to add sizable overhead and difficult to scale.... and they need to be regularly patched to prevent hacker attacks.  Please give Splashtop a free test drive. I'm here to answer any question.