I can't seem to find the thread right now, but there was a question about why the performance of Remote Desktop over Live Mesh is so poor compared to using the regular Remote Desktop client. The answer was that the Mesh version runs through a proxy so there's the advantage of not having to deal with firewalls/routers but the performance is poorer.
Is this the case? Are all Live Mesh operations proxied through Microsoft's servers or do the servers act as mediation servers to cross NAT/firewalls but still establish peer to peer connections (similar to Logmein's Hamachi)? I certainly have noticed the Remote Desktop performance is very poor over Mesh. On one system, for some reason it won't disable aero and the wallpaper on the remote host (I suspect it's a dual display bug) so it's practically unusably slow. In contrast, when I run the regular Remote Desktop client over Hamachi (to avoid having to map ports) the performance is great, even with wallpaper and other features enabled. I've also used GoToMeeting for various web seminars and the performance also puts Mesh's Remote Desktop performance to shame.
The latest version of Live Mesh will attempt a direct peer-to-peer connection, but failing that it will fall back on relayed data (similar to what Hamachi does when it can't establish a tunnel between two clients).
We're all hoping for further remote desktop improvements as time goes on - making Live Mesh even more useful!
The latest version of Live Mesh will attempt a direct peer-to-peer connection, but failing that it will fall back on relayed data (similar to what Hamachi does when it can't establish a tunnel between two clients).
We're all hoping for further remote desktop improvements as time goes on - making Live Mesh even more useful!
My experience has been that Remote Desktop over Live Mesh performs poorly even when both peers are able to establish a direct peer to peer connection over Hamachi (as I mentioned, using Windows Remote Desktop client over Hamachi works much better). So I'm still wondering how effective Live Mesh is at establishing Peer to Peer connections. Does it use some kind of NAT traversal technique like Hamachi or does it rely on having Remote Desktop ports available over the NAT before falling back to the Relay?
Apologies, I should have been more clear in my initial answer - Live Mesh does not (according to what has been made public) currently employ any techniques to get around firewalls and NATs apart from the proxying. If a direct P2P connection cannot be established (for example, when the two machines are on the same LAN) Live Mesh will always fall back on proxied mode. So it does nothing like the techniques that Hamachi employs.
From previous posts I think that the developers are working on improving the Remote Desktop support, as even when running on a LAN it seems to run that little bit slower than direct Remote Desktop.
Do you know if there is any active development on implementing NAT traversal technology? Even on the same LAN if machines are using firewall a direct connection may not be established. Beyond just Remote Desktop, direct peer to peer connection would speed up peer to peer syncing of large files and since Mesh is supposed to be a platform for future software development, this could be a big deal in terms of providing acceptable performance. Maybe Microsoft should buy Logmein instead of Yahoo... :)
To the best of my knowledge, there is no way to configure your firewall for Live Mesh remote desktop functionality. -steveMicrosoft MVP Windows Live / Windows Live OneCare Forum Moderator
