[winswitch] XPRA performance on jittery and droppy connections

[David Johnston]

Good Day, sorry for the length but I really need help! Payment offered!

I'm working on the design and planning for a large-scale XPRA deployment and there is an issue I'm trying to solve:

On connections with higher-than-normal jitter and packet loss/delays, the UI performance degradation is very severe. I'm using primarily the HTML5 client, 4.04 and 4.1, but the full fat client has the same issue. Setting quality=5 helps somewhat but looks really bad.

However, if I RDP to something using the same connection, I get full resolution and the degradation is barely noticeable. I am using nested VPNs and packet shaping to reproduce my clients' remote access network conditions. The problem looks exactly like it does on their network so I think it's a fair reproduction.

XPRA gets into a state where it's hardly using any bandwidth, but the session pauses greyed-out with the little spinning circle. (Presumably waiting for expected packets that it's not getting) Sometimes I get a session timeout and it tries to re-connect. As soon as I hit it with usage again (scrolling in a window) the problem starts again and the session eventually halts; while using very little bandwidth.

XPRA debug logs have tons of backlogs and delays. The actual connection latency may only be 40ms, but it ends up waiting for multiple seconds, apparently without retrying even after the normal latency has been far exceeded.

When I look at PCAPs, I can see tons of TCP dup acks and retransmits in both XPRA and RDP (expected given the conditions), but somehow RDP is able to recover better. RDP has a higher packet frequency, but fewer packets close to the MTU. I tried reducing the MTU to 800 but the same exact problem happens. RDP seems to better auto-correct for buffering, delays, and loss.

I can measure the network's loss with this tool by cranking the packet size and frequency: https://packetlosstest.com/ As long as I stay below a threshold, the latency and loss are low. RDP seems to be able to find this threshold and stay under it.

What I would like to ask is:

  *   Is there a way to force the client.jitter=1000 even on non-wireless?
  *   Is there a way to pre-emptively re-request packets more aggressively?
  *   If I was to dig into the source to work on this, where should I dig?

If there are any takers to help me out with this, I'll give full logs and remote access to my environment and there is a possibility of payment for services rendered as well, we can negotiate.

Thank you so much, I'm looking forward to hearing from you.

David W Johnston
DLS Technology Corp