Forum Discussion
New Skype for Business on Mac Insider build available (16.13.168)
Hi Phillip,
I run a DevOps team. We meet on SfB - 1x Mac Brisbane (myself), 5x PCs (Mumbai), 1x PC (Sydney). We're finding desktop sharing performance with SfB bordering on unusable. As a distributed team, desktop sharing is essential for our team to work together - we design, review and share skills through desktop sharing.
We benchmarked SfB yesterday, and benchmarked WebEx for a comparison:
Time to initiate a screen share: SfB - 14 secs, WebEx - 4 secs
Lag: SfB - 8 secs, WebEx - 1 sec
Resolution/Clarity: SfB - good, WebEx - good
Frame rate: SfB - jerky (~1 fps), WebEx - smooth (>5 fps)
Aside from my interest in getting SfB desktop sharing working well for my team/department/company, our business is providing IT for 1000 companies, including national & international networks and unified comms, including SfB. We're keen to get our SfB implementation tuned to provide good performance, as a reference implementation for our customers.
Thanks for info on QoS for SfB Mac. I'll ensure that EnableQoS is switched on in our servers to help audio and video. From the info you supplied above, it won't help desktop sharing, as the Mac client doesn't apply QoS tags (DSCP marking) to desktop sharing packets.
A couple of questions:
- How can I lobby y'all to add QoS / DSCP marking for desktop sharing to Mac? It is useful to QoS for video, but having a screen share update quickly and smoothly is actually much more useful to us than having great video.
- I understand video based screen sharing (VbSS) is planned for SfB Mac. That would be really helpful - I understand we can expect a 6x improvement in frame rate. I'm finding with the current RDP-based screen sharing my MacBook Pro 13" 2016 heaves - even the keyboard is slow to respond, unlike screen sharing in Skype Personal, WebEx, Google Remote Desktop, Team Viewer, VNC, SplashView, etc. which don't noticeably impact my Mac's responsiveness. I'm hoping with VbSS, the SfB Mac developers will offload the video encode to the H.264 encoding silicon built into modern CPUs. Is there any timeframe for delivering VbSS?
- If Desktop Sharing is the priority, should I give up on SfB Mac until VbSS comes, and use a Windows 10 VM with SfB for Windows in the meantime? (A bit inconvenient.)
- Does Microsoft have any SfB team members who could work with us to bring our SfB desktop sharing numbers down into the range of WebEx?
Cheers,
-Tas.
- I am personally confused by this. How does Skype take 14 seconds to initiate a screen share? I agree the VbSS will be helpful as well as marking the traffic but I am not experiencing this so I'm curious on where the 14 seconds come from. We also found out with the latest Mac client our packets are being marked except for application sharing.
Hi Brian,
I'm not sure why it takes 14 seconds - it's not my area of expertise. That's part of why I posted above.
Until someone who knows SfB performance factors chimes in, here are some guessed-at possibilities:
- There are 7 people on the call, which could add to the desktop sharing setup time.
- The 7 people are in two continents, with a 170ms ping latency on the dedicated network link in between. If the desktop sharing setup protocol is chatty (i.e. a lot of network round trips), those round trips could add up to a significant delay.
- There's a mix of VbSS-capable and RDP-only capable clients on the call. There may be some time needed to negotiate what screen sharing protocol to use.
- Some other screen sharing platforms run a test on the network to determine available bandwidth, which adds to the setup time - don't know if SfB does this.
- There may be some time to negotiate frame rate. Don't know if SfB does this.
- If there's any transcoding of desktop sharing streams - I don't know if SfB does this - e.g. from VbSS to RDP - this could add to the setup time.
- My MacBook Pro 13" 2016 becomes very laggy when running SfB screen sharing. It could be that the RDP-based screen sharing on the SfB Mac client is inefficient, and contributes to the setup time.
Cheers,
-Tas.
Tas,
Are you using SfB online or on prem? What happens if you try to initiate a P2P screen share; does it take the same amount of time? SfB will default to RDP if any user does not have a VbSS client. This sounds to be like it could be more network related than SfB function.
We have over 500 Mac's in our environment. The SfB Mac client has come a long way in a little over a year from his GA release. I am running hybrid. In both scenario's online or on prem it doesn't take this long. In fact, every Wednesday we do a conference call with over 100 users on it and a screen share still doesn't take that long.
Hello, Tasman:
Support for VbSS will be coming to SfB server 2015 customers in our next cumulative update, planned for Q2, 2018. When VbSS is available, you should see a significant improvement in performance for screen sharing, although do note that VbSS does require higher bandwidth, so customers can experience issues initially if their network capacity is not tuned for that. I can pass on your request for QoS support for screen sharing to the teams that own that support. For assistance with your performance issues, I would recommend working through Microsoft support for that.
Phil.
Thanks Phillip - that's really helpful.
QoS for screen sharing is pretty important for us. International network links are expensive, so they tend to be more contended than national links. Be able to put desktop sharing traffic at a similar or higher priority than video traffic on our international and inter-city links will likely be necessary to get good desktop sharing performance.
How would I check whether my request for QoS on desktop sharing for SfB Mac has been accepted/scheduled/ETA/completed? That way, I'll know whether to hang on for QoS implementation, or bite the bullet, and build a Windows 10 VM to run SfB Windows.
Again, thanks for your help. It's really great to know VbSS is coming calendar Q2.
