[Spice-devel] Unfair comparisons with RDP

[John A. Sullivan III]

On Fri, 2011-07-01 at 15:00 +0200, Gianluca Cecchi wrote:
> On Fri, Jul 1, 2011 at 1:04 PM, John A. Sullivan III  wrote:
> > Interesting observation. That is true; we did not create separate VM
> > definitions for SPICE and TSPlus thus the TSPlus environment is using
> > the QXL driver.  Would we expect that to have any "supercharging" effect
> > on RDP?
> >
> >
> 
> Probably not, because afaik (that is not so much ;-) Remote Desktop
> (and probably tsplus too) works at the GDI call level, so it should
> not depend so much on video adapter/video driver...
> It was simply a question that arose analysing how to correctly
> replicate comparisons...
> Coming back to the test case and these operations:
> 
> rdp
> 17:             display desktop, i.e., minimize all open applications
> 42:             Paint existing LibreOffice document, i.e., restore from minimize
> 
> spice
> 61:             display desktop, i.e., minimize all open applications
> 92:             Paint existing LibreOffice document, i.e., restore from minimize
> 
> I think they are GDI ones, so that naturally when using rdp they are
> executed locally on client desktop (only the gdi directives are sent),
> while in spice (raster?) they will be network intensive (from a slow
> link point of view).
> So probably an optimized rdp could never be beaten on too slow links?
> 
> So my question is: could it be that instead of say spice vs tsplus in
> general, we ought to go in determining what is the minimum necessary
> bandwith to give the final user an acceptable experience (need to
> define "acceptable" ;-) ?
> 
> Or, if I'm not wrong, as pcoip incorporates in some way both rdp and
> raster capabilities so that it is able to "automatically" determine
> what to use, the right way should be to do something similar for
> spice?
> 
> Gianluca
That's an interesting question.  I don't want to tie up the devs too
badly on things I can research myself and I've not yet fully read all
the protocol documents (not that I'd fully understand them either!) but
this is an area where I am confused.