I have been experiencing frequent disconnects using RDP to one of my remote desktops using the Windows 11 Remote Desktop Client and today I found
a potential fix/workaround.
#I had a productive weekend tech wise, built a new remote desktop using an LXC container running in Proxmox on the
Raspberry Pi 5 and I installed PagePark on a new server to host my outlines.
#
- I work from home and do not want to do any personal stuff on my work computer. While I can use my Macbook, I find it more convenient to use a remote desktop client on my work PC and have it open as a window on my work computer. Nearly all of my personal computing is done using a web browser, so browser performance is most important to me and I am using the Speedometer 3 benchmark to measure that performance.#
- The Macbook blows away performance of any other computer I have access to, but for the most part I don't really need that level of performance to browse my RSS feeds or read articles in Readwise Reader. What I am using are Linux desktops, mostly KDE Plasma, XFCE, or LXQt, running in a container or virtual machine running in Proxmox on either a Beelink U59 Pro or a Raspberry Pi 5 that is on my home network. #
- The baseline performance I seek is better than or equal to the Speedometer 3 score using Chrome on my work PC, which is an abysmal 4.04. For comparison, the same benchmark score using Chrome on my Macbook is 22! Yes, my work PC sucks. #
- For the last six months I have been using KDE in a Debian 12 Proxmox LXC container on the Beelink U59 Pro on which Chrome scores 2.63, not great but better than trying the same configuration in a virtual machine. A while back I bought a Raspberry Pi 5 which I recently "upgraded" by adding the Pi NVMe HAT and a 1 TB NVMe SSD. My first testing involved installing the Raspberry Pi OS and Chromium that achieved a Speedometer 3 score of 4.53, which is better than the work PC. #
- I could have just left the Raspberry Pi OS on that board and connected to it with VNC or RDP, but I wanted to try out Proxmox on the Pi 5 to see how it would perform, which I have done. Given that the Raspberry Pi 5 uses an ARM processor, that limits what one can run on it to virtual machines or containers supporting the ARM (aarch64) architecture. So far I have been able to run Debian 12 and Ubuntu 22.04 virtual machines, and I have tried LXC templates for Fedora 38, Alpine, Rocky Linux, and Ubuntu. #
- Over the weekend I provisioned a Fedora 38 container with 4 vCPUs and 4 GB of RAM, upgraded it to Fedora 39, then installed XFCE and Tigervnc. Again, being this container runs on ARM, the browser options are Firefox and Chromium as I haven't found an ARM version of Chrome that I can download and install in Linux. I was surprised to see a Speedometer 3 score of 4.04, that is much better than performance of the Chrome + Debian 12 container I had been using. #
- The Debian container has 2 vCPUs whereas the new Fedora 39 container has 4 vCPus, so I wondered whether adding 2 more vCPUs would make a difference, and it did, increasing the score to 3.73 from the 2.63 score I had seen previously. I next installed Chromium on that Debian desktop, ran Speedometer 3 again and it got a score of 4.73! #
- The results align to expectations in that the performance of the Intel Celeron N5105 CPU and the ARM Cortex-A76 have comparable clock speeds and 4 cores. Chromium appears to be that much better than Chrome, and that is noticeable in these more constrained performance environments. #
- I do have one apples-to-oranges situation in that I am using different distros, desktops and connection software between the two containers. I doubt that desktops (KDE and XFCE) or connection (RDP and VNC) software will make that much a difference in browser performance, but I wonder about the distro. Unfortunately, I can't seem to get any Debian ARM LXC template provided by Proxmox to work on the Raspberry Pi, so that means I will have to provision a Fedora container on the Beelink, which I will probably do and install XFCE and Tigervnc on it to see what results I get.#