Speed up SSH X11 forwarding

I use an Ubuntu server as a work-horse for my calculations and connect from my desktop-pc with ssh to the server. For some applications (gnuplot =) this is really slow altough it’s over LAN. I found on the internet some instructions to improve this situation: instead of the AES cipher the arcfour and blowfish ciphers perform much better and switching on compression also doesn’t hurt. Therefore one should use

ssh -c arcfour,blowfish-cbc -XC host.com

to connect to with ssh. And guess what? This really improves the situation, especially for gnuplot. Thanks Samat!

16 thoughts on “Speed up SSH X11 forwarding

  1. This tip made a huge difference. Now I can use the vmware server console on my mac. Without this it was unusably slow.

  2. Indeed, it speeds up X-11 forwarding over my 4Mbit internet connection. Now my remote apps are actually usable!

  3. Incredibly useful! Thanks very much. That sped up my X11 connections to a server upstairs from painful to quite usable, even over our 100-Mbit LAN.

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