Discussion:
[X2Go-Dev] Preferred settings for X2go LAN use
n***@stefanbaur.de
2012-02-21 19:27:23 UTC
Permalink
Hi everyone,

any recommendations on what settings I should use in X2go-Client when
the server is on the same LAN as the clients, and I want to watch
youtube (with Pulseaudio sound) via X2Go? The default settings already
look (and sound) promising, but it seems there are a few glitches... and
I'm wondering if they are real bugs or just side effects of a
less-than-ideal session setting.

I'm currently using a 100MBit switched LAN, with the option to upgrade
to 1 GBit LAN if that would make a major difference.

-Stefan
Michael Kromer
2012-02-21 19:36:49 UTC
Permalink
Hello Stefan,

well, in real world I would never use LAN as a setting, even on LAN i would use WAN as the primary setting. We've benchmarked it, and without access to the benchmarks right now (you should find them in some article by Harald Milz in the german issue of the linux magazine some months ago) I can only say: You'd have it better that way. I would recommend you to use jpeg compression in combination with libjpegturbo, since this makes a real difference - especially on modern netbooks since their processor speed is not the best but in combination with the SSE-instruction sets which are used for libjpegturbo this makes a major performance boost (up to 3x in my lab tests).

But: please tell us: what glitches do you suffer? What settings are you using?

An upgrade to Gigabit will not help you much IMHO, since one session and 100 Mbit is far more than enough. The only point where you could have fun with is with lower latency times - but a dedicated 100 mbit with not too much traffic should be a low latency line anyways ...

- mike

-----Ursprüngliche Nachricht-----
Von: ***@stefanbaur.de
Gesendet: Di 21.02.2012 20:27
Betreff: [X2Go-Dev] Preferred settings for X2go LAN use
Post by n***@stefanbaur.de
Hi everyone,
any recommendations on what settings I should use in X2go-Client when
the server is on the same LAN as the clients, and I want to watch
youtube (with Pulseaudio sound) via X2Go? The default settings already
look (and sound) promising, but it seems there are a few glitches... and
I'm wondering if they are real bugs or just side effects of a
less-than-ideal session setting.
I'm currently using a 100MBit switched LAN, with the option to upgrade
to 1 GBit LAN if that would make a major difference.
-Stefan
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n***@stefanbaur.de
2012-02-21 20:53:49 UTC
Permalink
Post by Michael Kromer
Hello Stefan,
well, in real world I would never use LAN as a setting, even on LAN i would use WAN as the primary setting.
That's what I remember from configuring NX Client, too, but I wasn't
sure if that's still the best way to do it with X2Go.
Post by Michael Kromer
We've benchmarked it, and without access to the benchmarks right now (you should find them in some article by Harald Milz in the german issue of the linux magazine some months ago) I can only say: You'd have it better that way.
Indeed, but the client offers two other settings that can be changed,
aside from the connection speed slider - compression method and image
quality.
And the sheer number of choices there makes a full test run rather
time-consuming, so I was wondering if anyone had ever experimented with
that before.
Post by Michael Kromer
I would recommend you to use jpeg compression in combination with libjpegturbo, since this makes a real difference - especially on modern netbooks since their processor speed is not the best but in combination with the SSE-instruction sets which are used for libjpegturbo this makes a major performance boost (up to 3x in my lab tests).
The thing is, I'm using the windows client, I'm not sure if and how I
could change to libjpegturbo there; and the libjpegturbo stuff is still
experimental/testing, something I don't want to force upon my clients.
I'm looking for solutions that work with a stock, stable X2Go install.
Post by Michael Kromer
But: please tell us: what glitches do you suffer?
Everything works great at first, short clips, like Adobe Flash animated
advertisements with sound, run rather smooth, but longer videos on
youtube experience a "stuck image" effect that only goes away when
moving the mouse over the area where the video plays (this helps for a
few seconds, then you have to repeat the procedure), also, the sound
starts to get choppy.
BUT: This *might* be due to something weird in my LAN config or due to
the client options I chose. It sure needs further testing and
verification before it can be considered a bug.
Post by Michael Kromer
What settings are you using?
WAN/16m-jpeg/9, audio enabled (pulseaudio). Client used for initial
testing was 3.99.1.0 (Windows).
Post by Michael Kromer
An upgrade to Gigabit will not help you much IMHO, since one session and 100 Mbit is far more than enough. The only point where you could have fun with is with lower latency times - but a dedicated 100 mbit with not too much traffic should be a low latency line anyways ...
Well, 100Mbit and a single user is my test setup, real-world use is more
like up to 5 users and the average small office LAN traffic (SMB shares,
database connections,...).

-Stefan
John Williams
2012-02-21 22:10:33 UTC
Permalink
On Tue, Feb 21, 2012 at 12:53 PM, ***@stefanbaur.de >
Everything works great at first, short clips, like Adobe Flash
animated
advertisements with sound, run rather smooth, but longer videos on youtube
experience a "stuck image" effect that only goes away when moving the mouse
over the area where the video plays (this helps for a few seconds, then you
have to repeat the procedure), also, the sound starts to get choppy.
BUT: This *might* be due to something weird in my LAN config or due to the
client options I chose. It sure needs further testing and verification
before it can be considered a bug.
Have you tried disabling (UNchecking) "Use SSH port forwarding to
tunnel sound system connections through firewalls"?

I have found that all versions of Windows x2goclient after 3.01-13,
including the latest 3.99.1.0 (preview2), have a problem with
tunneling sound through firewalls. It will intermittently lock up.
Sometimes it works fine for a while, but eventually the sound always
locks up. Disabling tunneling fixes that issue for me.
n***@stefanbaur.de
2012-02-21 22:13:27 UTC
Permalink
Post by n***@stefanbaur.de
Everything works great at first, short clips, like Adobe Flash
animated
advertisements with sound, run rather smooth, but longer videos on youtube
experience a "stuck image" effect that only goes away when moving the mouse
over the area where the video plays (this helps for a few seconds, then you
have to repeat the procedure), also, the sound starts to get choppy.
BUT: This *might* be due to something weird in my LAN config or due to the
client options I chose. It sure needs further testing and verification
before it can be considered a bug.
Have you tried disabling (UNchecking) "Use SSH port forwarding to
tunnel sound system connections through firewalls"?
No I haven't done so, yet, but I will. Thanks for the hint.

Out of curiousity, does disabling that option mean that the sound data
will go unencrypted and uncompressed over the LAN?

-Stefan
John A. Sullivan III
2012-02-21 22:15:28 UTC
Permalink
Post by n***@stefanbaur.de
Post by Michael Kromer
Hello Stefan,
well, in real world I would never use LAN as a setting, even on LAN i would use WAN as the primary setting.
That's what I remember from configuring NX Client, too, but I wasn't
sure if that's still the best way to do it with X2Go.
Post by Michael Kromer
We've benchmarked it, and without access to the benchmarks right now (you should find them in some article by Harald Milz in the german issue of the linux magazine some months ago) I can only say: You'd have it better that way.
Indeed, but the client offers two other settings that can be changed,
aside from the connection speed slider - compression method and image
quality.
And the sheer number of choices there makes a full test run rather
time-consuming, so I was wondering if anyone had ever experimented with
that before.
Post by Michael Kromer
I would recommend you to use jpeg compression in combination with libjpegturbo, since this makes a real difference - especially on modern netbooks since their processor speed is not the best but in combination with the SSE-instruction sets which are used for libjpegturbo this makes a major performance boost (up to 3x in my lab tests).
The thing is, I'm using the windows client, I'm not sure if and how I
could change to libjpegturbo there; and the libjpegturbo stuff is still
experimental/testing, something I don't want to force upon my clients.
I'm looking for solutions that work with a stock, stable X2Go install.
Post by Michael Kromer
But: please tell us: what glitches do you suffer?
Everything works great at first, short clips, like Adobe Flash animated
advertisements with sound, run rather smooth, but longer videos on
youtube experience a "stuck image" effect that only goes away when
moving the mouse over the area where the video plays (this helps for a
few seconds, then you have to repeat the procedure), also, the sound
starts to get choppy.
BUT: This *might* be due to something weird in my LAN config or due to
the client options I chose. It sure needs further testing and
verification before it can be considered a bug.
Post by Michael Kromer
What settings are you using?
WAN/16m-jpeg/9, audio enabled (pulseaudio). Client used for initial
testing was 3.99.1.0 (Windows).
Post by Michael Kromer
An upgrade to Gigabit will not help you much IMHO, since one session and 100 Mbit is far more than enough. The only point where you could have fun with is with lower latency times - but a dedicated 100 mbit with not too much traffic should be a low latency line anyways ...
Well, 100Mbit and a single user is my test setup, real-world use is more
like up to 5 users and the average small office LAN traffic (SMB shares,
database connections,...).
<snip>
Hi, Stefan. I would assume 16m-jpeg would be the best setting for video
but, in our non-video application, we were surprised to find that
16m-png-jpeg gave both better performance and clarity. I'm not sure
that compression or bandwidth are the issues although it is not an area
of expertise.

My hunch it is the way in which the screen is rendered. One of the devs
may be of much more help here. I'm guessing that NX is painting bitmaps
and doing so in the same manner for all portions of the screen no matter
what the nature of the screen changes.

If video is of critical importance and you are on a WAN, you may want to
consider SPICE instead. I am an ardent supporting of X2Go and actually
foresee a SPICE plugin to X2Go once SPICE matures as a WAN technology.
The big difference for video is that SPICE is an adaptive protocol. If
it senses that a portion of the screen is changing, it adapts the video
transmission algorithm from painting bitmaps to sending an mjpeg stream.
mjpeg is an intra-frame compression algorithm as opposed to the much
more WAN friendly inter-frame compression algorithms but it's generally
sufficient for a LAN and much better than drawing raw bitmaps.

I've always wondered what the difference is between mjpeg and whatever
NX calls 16m-jpeg compression but the performance difference for video
is quite noticeable. Perhaps one of the devs could explain the
difference to us. Hope that helps - John
Moritz Strübe
2012-02-22 08:30:17 UTC
Permalink
Post by Michael Kromer
I would recommend you to use jpeg compression in combination with libjpegturbo
A while ago I did some experiments, too. I ended up using RGB. Even
using RLE put significant more load on the system I was testing (Server
and Client). Due to the artefacts JPEG was never an option to me. But
probably you won't get around some experiments, because there are just
too many things that influence the results (bandwidth, delay, server
architecture, client architecture, etc). We should start a wiki-page on
this. ;)

Cheers
Morty
John A. Sullivan III
2012-02-22 17:38:37 UTC
Permalink
Post by Moritz Strübe
Post by Michael Kromer
I would recommend you to use jpeg compression in combination with libjpegturbo
A while ago I did some experiments, too. I ended up using RGB. Even
using RLE put significant more load on the system I was testing (Server
and Client). Due to the artefacts JPEG was never an option to me. But
probably you won't get around some experiments, because there are just
too many things that influence the results (bandwidth, delay, server
architecture, client architecture, etc). We should start a wiki-page on
this. ;)
<snip>
Interesting. I have not had the time to pursue it but, I found in one
particular installation where we were running X2Go from a Windows RDS
session, anything that used image compression was completely corrupted -
jpeg and png. We had to revert to RGB. I do not know why - John
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