After playing with TigerVNC's version of WinVNC for a while, it is unfortunately too broken on Windows 7 to provide a quick enough solution for my customer. However, I wanted to share some of my general findings regarding the state of Windows VNC servers, in case someone else is inspired to adopt TigerVNC's Windows server in the future.
We were looking for a WinVNC solution that could be brought up to TurboVNC's levels of performance without a lot of break/fix work. TurboVNC: TurboVNC's WinVNC is the fastest out there (equal in performance to the TurboVNC or TigerVNC Linux server), but it's still based on the TightVNC 1.3.10 code base, which doesn't work properly on W7 or Vista and has a lot of rendering issues on all Windows platforms (including XP.) Its usability is marginal due to those issues. TigerVNC: TigerVNC's WinVNC is the second fastest but is still only about half as fast as TurboVNC, even though the Tight encoders in the two solutions should be performing the same now (something else is causing TigerVNC's performance to lag-- didn't dig into it to find out what.) TigerVNC's Windows server works well on XP but has issues with W7 (doesn't work at all when run as a service, and even in User Mode, some windows can't be remotely controlled-- probably all issues related to W7's new security model.) TightVNC 2.0.x: The best usability and the cleanest functionality of any open source implementation, and it works on modern Windows distros, but its best performance is unusably slow (~1/40 that of TurboVNC.) UltraVNC: Good usability and works cleanly on modern Windows distros, but it exhibits banding artifacts, and its best performance is about 1/4 that of TurboVNC. RealVNC 4.6 Enterprise: By far the best usability and functionality of any WinVNC solution I tested, but its best performance is 1/3 of TurboVNC (and it's proprietary.) In short, there is really no WinVNC solution that is both a solid solution for modern systems as well as a fast solution. Bringing TightVNC up to TurboVNC's levels of performance would require a similar encoder overhaul to the one I completed in August for TigerVNC (I don't relish that thought), and TigerVNC would require some additional optimization work as well as break/fix work to fix the W7 issues-- perhaps not as much of an effort as another encoder overhaul but still more of an effort than I have the cycles for at the moment. Given that we're not moving forward with TigerVNC's WinVNC, I have no objections to eliminating Visual C++ support entirely, and I'll proceed with doing that if no one else objects (which I assume they don't, since no one spoke up during our knock-down drag-out debate on the subject.) DRC ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ RSA(R) Conference 2012 Save $700 by Nov 18 Register now http://p.sf.net/sfu/rsa-sfdev2dev1 _______________________________________________ Tigervnc-devel mailing list Tigervnc-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/tigervnc-devel
