"Worst software product of the year" award

Published 09 October 04 12:09 PM | alexcampbell

I'd like to nominate VNC for this fictional award.  I just logged into one of our webservers in Terminal Services and it didn't even break a sweat.  Afterward I logged into it using VNC and it ground to a halt and sat at 100% CPU usage for about 15 minutes.

This machine is a dual Operton with 4GB of RAM and WD Raptor SATA hard drives.  Does anyone know what sort of machine one would need to use VNC without trashing the machine we're logging into?

Comments

# Randy Ridge said on October 8, 2004 10:03 PM:

try tightvnc, it runs well for me

# Jeff Atwood said on October 8, 2004 10:52 PM:

You HAVE to use one that hooks the video driver, otherwise you'll clobber the CPU with hundreds of "gee, did any windows just modify the display?" type API calls. This has been a weakness of classic VNC since forever.

TightVNC does have such a video driver, so I recommend that one.

# Steve Hall said on October 8, 2004 10:54 PM:

I ran into that problem over a year ago, starting with a specific new release. On non-WinXP machines, I've been using a pretty old release that doesn't sit and suck cycles, and on WinXP and Win2KS machines I've switched over to using Remote Desktop. (The old release that was stable is from 3-4 years ago...I seem to remember that it's 3.3.7 or 3.3.9...)

Overall, Remote Desktop performs much faster and doesn't suffer the "stale window refresh" problem that VNC has always had with a lot of video cards...

# Jerry Dennany said on October 8, 2004 11:44 PM:

Ah, but VNC filled a niche long before RDP was a viable alternative!

Sure, MS Word is often better than vi, but you can hardly compare the two.

# Mike Gunderloy said on October 9, 2004 12:05 AM:

Using RealVNC on the server, Win2VNC on the client, I'm seeing 0-1% of CPU devoted to VNC on the server. Dunno what your problem is, but that's not something I've encountered in using various versions of the software over the years.

# Mark said on October 9, 2004 04:26 AM:

The only time I've seen high CPU usage with VNC is using UltraVNC with the video driver. It gives better performance, but sucks 20-30% CPU. Never had any issues with TightVNC or VNC Classic.
Of course, awarding a Worst SW award based on one experience is silly. Lots of people use VNC for things RDP can't do. Cross platform connections, console access, etc.
Given the choice on a Windows server, however, I usually use RDP. Though I have VNC installed on them as a backup or to get to the console in Win2000.