[Spice-devel] Our current open issues

[John A. Sullivan III]

Hello, all.  I know I've raised a large number of issues over the last
few weeks most of which are still open.  I'd like to summarize them here
and ask for your direction on how we can further troubleshoot and
resolve them, in other words, how can we as integrators rather than
programmers help.

The bottom line is that SPICE is much slower than RDP for accessing the
same Windows guest and it is not only orders of magnitude slower than
X2Go for accessing Linux guests, it is not even usable.  It is quite
possible we have mangled the installation but we have tried to be
careful and have stuck primarily with Fedora 15 to make our installation
as much "out of the box" as possible.  Here are the specifics:

Linux guest:
Fedora 15 guest X process runs at nearly 100% when trying to do anything
via a SPICE client either Windows or Linux.  Our last understanding is
that this is a driver problem thus the current implementation seems
broken.

Windows guest - both Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008:
SPICE is transferring four to five times as much data across the wire as
RDP even with effects disabled.  VDAgent is running although it is
sometimes unstable and we are using a virtio serial driver.  QXL driver
is working.  We were told it that our packet traces seemed to indicate
we were not compressing images even though we are configured to do so,
our bandwidth is less than 10 Mbps, and the qemu server logs seem to
indicate we are using compression.  We reconfigured to force compression
and saw the same anecdotal results.  I'm not sure how we measure this if
the configuration and logs are saying we are compressing.  How can we
verify this lack of compression? Is this discerned from the Wireshark
dissector? If so, is there a newer one available than the one on the web
site?

We were losing most mouse scroll events.  This seems to be much better
after upgrading our Windows clients to spice-protocol-0.8.1 today.  I do
not know if that is coincidental.  A yum upgrade to the Fedora 15 host
did not pull in a new spice-protocol; it is still 0.8.0 and I would
assume we need 0.8.1 on both sides to see any benefit but that is just a
guess.  Scrolling is delayed like just about all events but at least it
is no longer lost.

VDAgent stops responding randomly. Although this is MUCH better since
disabling the powersave options, it still occurs.  We've opened a bug
report and submitted the vdagent and vdservice logs.

So, I suppose one question is, are these because of misconfigurations on
our part or are they bugs still being worked out in SPICE? Would it make
more sense for use to recompile everything from git? If so, which
repository? However, does that then imply that SPICE is not yet really
ready for production WAN use?

Sorry to be a pain but I suppose it is because we really want to use
SPICE but we keep coming up a little short compared to more mature
technologies.  Thanks - John