Use "nopack" for local x2go connections on fast networks
I tested a couple of different compression and encoding methods (as they call them) with an x2go client running on a Raspberry pi B+ running Raspbian. It is connected via 100mb/s Ethernet to an early Core2Duo server running Ubuntu 15.04 with 8gigs of RAM. The desktop is LXDE.
I entered this url:
http://www.kjell.com/se/sok?query=rel%C3%A4
In the Firefox browser on the server machine. Firefox has funky scroll settings and by fiddling with them (disabling smooth scrolling and hardware acceleration among other things) one can get a much faster scroll under x2go. I did not do that fiddling before doing the tests. However the below data I believe still holds for the speed of trying to render Firefox in an x2go unfriendly configuration and hence the general rendering speed on the client side.
I scrolled to the bottom of that page and hit "top" on the keyboard to make the browser scroll to the top of the page. For some compression and encoding settings it could take 5 seconds. With nopack it took 2 seconds (roughly, timed with the ticks from my wristwatch).
So, nopack is best, But 2 seconds on a local network is still unacceptable while browsing. On my two year old Intel 4200U i5 laptop it is instantaneous.
With an insecure XDMCP connection between the two same computers (Pi, C2D) using Xephyr in Remmina on the client and lightdm on the server, the scroll takes 1 second. Using the native Firefoc browser on the Raspberry pi, it takes 1.5 seconds, so maybe the B+ just isn't cut out to be a computer you can browse smoothly on with a big screen, anyway you slice it.
Update: You can configure the Raspberry Pi to use more of its memory for graphics. It is not clear to me yet if this will improve performance, but it will look better subjectively at least. A discussion on how to configure graphics memory is here:
Raspberry pi 2 1024M Increase Gpu Memory to 512 at least - Raspberry Pi Stack Exchange
Reference info here:
And as mentioned above, changing the scroll settings in Firefox helped a lot. In fact you get it down to close to instantaneous in x2go. Will try to update on the settings that helped with that.