Connection to Apple Remote Desktop (ARD) disconnects sporadically

Hi,

I think it it somewhat normal for the ARD connection to break when the macbook does intensive work, because the resources are limited. Changing the performance setting is a great way to fix this and you have already found one that works. May I ask why you don't want to keep it at Apple MVS codec ?

An other solution would be to save your username and password in your connection so that when the connection breaks, RDM can reconnect without you having to input your password again. Or do you have an issue where your password is in your connection, but it still asks you to input your password ?

Best regards,

It didn't log in after brief disconnections. The screen would blink for a fraction of second, and gets kicked back to the log in screen.

zlib definitely looks a lot sharper, since I have almost infinite bandwidth to transfer it. MVS isn't as good but not bad at all.

I have tried the other program "Parsec" too. Parsec would freeze briefly when the Mac was running busy, but didn't drop off.

Hello

Just to follow up on the information already given by my colleague: it sounds like either the ARDAgent (the service that runs inside the window session and does the actual screen sharing work) or the window server itself is either crashing, or being terminated by the OS due to low resources.

Indeed zlib should be preferred on such a high bandwidth connection as the quality will be better; but it's impossible for us to say why this makes a difference. Perhaps it simply consumes more resources or the Apple adaptive codec is able to do more work in hardware.

Parsec is not a fair comparison, because they use their own protocol.

When this issue happens you might try looking in the system log (in Console.app) and searching for references to screensharingd or ardagent. It could give some more insight into what is happening.

I'm afraid I'm not aware of any optimization we can make on our side, this sounds like a purely server side issue. I would be interested to know if you got the same results using Apple's own client, but I'm not sure that you can select the codec with ScreenSharing.app (I don't know if it selects the codec dynamically or always uses Apple adaptive). The Apple Remote Desktop application does let you select the codec to use, but it's also quite expensive.

Please, let me know if something isn't clear or you have further questions

Kind regards,

Hello Richard,

Please don't get me wrong. I don't mean accusation of RDM. Parsec has its own problems. Since I have switched to Apple MVS, RDM has been entirely stable and I'm very happy with it.

I just tried to report about what happend, in case you may want to collect some product usage feedback.

Thanks,
Serena

Hello Serena

It's good information indeed. Like I wrote, it might be worth digging into Console.app and see if the system expresses a reason for this behaviour, that you might find a workaround. The experience is quite a lot better with zlib over a fast link.

Thanks again and good luck

Kind regards,