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I regularly need to connect from a Windows box to an OS X box over VNC.

OS X has VNC built-in as part of its "Screen Sharing" tool, but for some reason, it's much faster to connect from OS X to OS X or from OS X to Windows than it is to connect from Windows to OS X. (I use UltraVNC on Windows.) Windows to OS X connectivity is almost unusably slow, even when the two boxes are sitting right next to each other, plugged into the same router.

How can I improve performance in this case? Should I explore alternate Windows clients? Alternate OS X VNC servers? Should I use some other screen-sharing tool instead of VNC? If so, what?

(Note that this question is more specific than other more general questions.)

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  • This is a duplicate of superuser.com/questions/164576/… There are more answers over there.
    – Winter Dragoness
    Commented Oct 20, 2016 at 1:54
  • vnc-4_1_2-x86_win32_viewer.exe 10.12.200.31 FullColour=true is slower, but works well for me
    – gregg
    Commented Jun 1, 2022 at 21:34

5 Answers 5

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OS X Leopard with its own ScreenSharing client, connecting to another OS X native screen sharing server, does some negotiation on colour depth, etc., so it's transferring less data.

(You can see this effect exaggerated if you connect to an OS X system from Windows using the RealVNC client over a higher latency connection. It will take a long time to build up the screen output.)

I couldn't find a way to make RealVNC request a lower colour depth so what I did, to work around this, was run a copy of the VNC server Vine Server(now forked)(Original link here), on OS X with the -maxdepth 8 option (and -rfbport 5901 to run it as an alternate server), and connect to that when I connect long distance (which I always do through an SSH tunnel, before anyone states the obvious.)

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+50

Products that were not mentioned in this old post:

You will need to evaluate their speed for your setup, with an eye to their cost.

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  • Does AnyDesk require to install an AnyDesk server on the Mac? I have tried to connect AnyDesk Windows to the Mac VNC server, but it doesn't work.
    – Basj
    Commented May 28, 2022 at 9:02
  • Their website is strangely lacking in information about it. You could contact their Sales or Support.
    – harrymc
    Commented May 28, 2022 at 9:13
  • NoMachine worked excellently for me! Thank you.
    – Zach Bloomquist
    Commented Jun 3, 2022 at 1:12
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I've switched from UltraVNC (back) to RealVNC, primarily because UltraVNC was not handling my multi-monitor server right.

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  • I also switched to RealVNC as it provided the best speed. I'm now running 1080p over a 100 Mbit network without problems. OSXVnc was too slow, as was Apple Screen Sharing.
    – Adam Lindberg
    Commented Apr 30, 2011 at 19:22
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    Did you use RealVNC on both client and server side?
    – thomthom
    Commented May 27, 2012 at 18:59
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I found switching to Vine Server rather than the default Apple one made a huge difference to performance.

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I experienced the same thing, but could not get UltraVNC or TightVNC to match the performance I expected. I was tipped of TeamViewer and it worked like a charm. The setup configured the computers for access and after letting them accept connections over LAN I got speedy remote control with full colours.

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  • Do note the price of those products went from $0 to $750
    – Joseph Lennox
    Commented Mar 3, 2015 at 23:17

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