I regularly need to connect from a Windows box to an OSX box over VNC.
OSX has VNC built-in as part of its "Screen Sharing" tool, but for some reason, it's much faster to connect from OSX to OSX or from OSX to Windows than it is to connect from Windows to OSX. (I use UltraVNC on Windows.) Windows to OSX connectivity is almost unusably slow, even when the two boxes are sitting right next to each other, plugged into the same router.
How can I improve performance in this case? Should I explore alternate Windows clients? Alternate OSX VNC servers? Should I use some other screen-sharing tool instead of VNC? (If so, what?)
(Note that this question is more specific than other more general questions.)
Best Answer
OS X Leopard with its own ScreenSharing client, connecting to another OS X native screen sharing server, does some negotiation on colour depth, etc., so it's transferring less data.
(You can see this effect exaggerated if you connect to an OS X system from Windows using the RealVNC client over a higher latency connection. It will take a long time to build up the screen output.)
I couldn't find a way to make RealVNC request a lower colour depth so what I did, to work around this, was run a copy of VineServer on OS X with the '-maxdepth 8' option (and '-rfbport 5901' to run it as an alternate server), and connect to that when I connect long distance (which I always do through an SSH tunnel, before anyone states the obvious.)