[Spice-devel] Our current open issues

[John A. Sullivan III]

On Tue, 2011-07-19 at 22:31 -0400, John A. Sullivan III wrote: 
> 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.

Oops! I spoke to soon.  My previous testing was with the Linux SPICE
client.  This is still a problem with the Linux client even with
spice-protocol-0.8.1; I lose most but not all of the mouse scroll
events.  It works much better under Windows.

> 
> 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
> 
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Spice-devel mailing list
> Spice-devel at lists.freedesktop.org
> http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/spice-devel