Hi Nick,

> First, I'm not sure that I understand what the various test cases mean. I 
> don't know what "NOT Smoothing NOT text" means? Maybe that smooth is disabled 
> and you're not display text?

NOT Text = Start RDP Session and don’t start an apps.
NOT Smoothing = Font smoothing not enabled.

It’s for special use case. Screenshot with smooth fonts plays better with OCR.

Interestingly the 11 year old post on Smooth Font RDP bandwidth is still 
correct. No change.

Thanks, Adrian

,
From: Nick Couchman [mailto:[email protected]]
Sent: 27 November 2021 15:23
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: enable-font-smoothing - Network Overhead

On Sat, Nov 27, 2021 at 4:02 AM Adrian Owen 
<[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
Hi Nick,

Test results:

Chrome Browser 1200 x 800
Debian Buster Guacamole 1.2
Target Windows 2016 Server

Total Network Bytes. 4 x 30 second RDP Sessions.

Font Smoothing Test             Target->Guacamole(3389 RDP)     
Guacamole->Browser(443 HTTP)
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
NOT Smoothing NOT text  312                             21K
NOT Smoothing AND text  381K                            221K
Smoothing NOT text              312                             21K
Smoothing AND text              1054K                           496K

Font smoothing enabled = 300% RDP increase, 200% HTTP increase.

Could the HTTP increase be reduced?

First, I'm not sure that I understand what the various test cases mean. I don't 
know what "NOT Smoothing NOT text" means? Maybe that smooth is disabled and 
you're not display text?

However, I would say that if "Smoothing AND text" means that you've got font 
smoothing enabled and a lot of text, the RDP session is having to process a lot 
of edges of many pixels on the screen in order to smooth all of the text on the 
screen, and this is necessarily going to mean that more regions of the screen 
need to be updated and smoothed, which is naturally going to result in larger 
amounts of data going back and forth. It's also worth pointing out that the 
presence of text seems, itself, to be a driver for bandwidth - if you're using 
21K without text, and 221K with text, that's a 10x increase in bandwidth 
utilization. It's only double that amount when you smooth it, so that's less 
the issue than the presence of text.

As far as what can be done to limit the HTTP increase - you have part of your 
answer - don't enable font smoothing (which appears to double the bandwidth 
requirement. Beyond that, I'm not sure anything can be done.

That said, are you running into situations where bandwidth or network 
utilization related to Guacamole is a problem? Guacamole is reasonably good at 
1) using the available resources, including bandwidth, but then, 2) balancing 
connections over the available resources to avoid one connection monopolizing 
the resources. If you're not seeing any issues, and you're scaling up the 
number of connections, then I wouldn't worry about it until you're actually 
seeing problems.

-Nick

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