Apple Remote Desktop Sluggishness

[gskibum]

Hey all.

Some time ago (1+ years ago) Apple Remote Desktop on my main Macbook Pro started bogging down when screen sharing from a remote Mac that has motion on the screen. The session becomes utterly slow and the fans ramp up on the local host because it's working so hard. Sessions with static screens are ok, but when there is motion or video on the client systems, such as a screen saver, Time Machine.app or youtube the performance becomes terrible & unusable. Hosts with high resolution displays compound the problem.

I have encryption set to passwords and keystrokes only. Setting the display quality to B&W or grayscale makes no difference. So long as there is animation or motion video the session performance is terrible.

I am using a 2013 MacBook Pro Retina with 16-GB RAM. I hate to trash preferences and lose all the customizations that I have made.

I tried testing with an 11" Macbook Air and it doesn't exhibit this behavior.

Any suggestions?

[tschaps]

If you haven't already, I would create a new user on the same laptop and try it. That would help rule out a hardware cause. If the result of that test suggested it was not hardware or OS but something in your user profile, I'd log back in to your personal account and check the console for errors while the behavior is occurring. If still no clues, I'd set the display resolution back to non-retina resolution and next try quitting any background services that you can and testing again. If still no difference, you'd have to get a little more serious with uninstalling optional things, such as plug-ins until you got your account down to a basic account like that "new user" test account you tried successfully. My guess is you'd find some clues before you got to that point and might figure it out.
Please report back what you find out!