how to make fast SSH X11 forwarding (specifically, making firefox context menu show up quickly)

Question

Remote Firefox over SSH is pretty usable until you try a right click to make context menu show up. It takes about 5 seconds for the context menu to appear. It seems it takes many round trips.

ssh -c blowfish-cbc -C -Y host

I believe with the above command, it's more faster. I heard blowfish-cbc cipher is pretty fast while being secure. Is there anything else I should look?

But then maybe that is just placebo effect. I don't know how to time this 5 seconds event exactly.

Solution 1

Give FreeNX a try.

Solution 2

Here is the change I have made to make firefox runnable over X11forwarding. I have bolden the most efficient modification. The major problem seens to be caused by the subsection of the start/new page, disabled it have make firefox feel from sluggish to blazing fast.

firefox config modification

about:config

edit and change for

• browser.newtabpage.activity-stream.feeds.section.highlights false
• browser.newtabpage.activity-stream.feeds.section.topstories false
• toolkit.cosmeticAnimations.enabled false browser.ctrlTab.previews
• false browser.urlbar.maxRichResults -1
• browser.download.animateNotifications false
• dom.animations-api.element-animate.enabled false
• image.mem.animated.discardable false
• browser.tabs.remote.autostart false
• Browser.startup.page 0

create

extensions.checkCompatibility false

manual modification

about:preference

disable all performance setting:

• use recommanded performance setting
• use hardware acceleration

disable: autoscrolling et use smooth scrolling.

about:preferences#privacy

• disable: allow firefox to send technical and interaction data to Mozilla
• disable: prevent accessibility service from accessing your browser

sshd_config modification

• X11Forwarding yes
• TCPKeepAlive yes
• UseDNS yes
• Compression yes
• Ciphers blowfish-cbc,aes128-cbc,3des-cbc,cast128-cbc,arcfour,aes192-cbc,aes256-cbc

Comments

[David Rickman]

He he could just tunnel his traffic instead of pulling a remote X app over SSH.

[sybreon]

+1 for NX. I have since dumped SSH/XDMCP for NX.

[RamyenHead]

I'm using Firefox on the remote end. Maybe I should use NX.

[besabestin]

You might have to. NX is supposed to be quite good. Out of curiosity, what kind of network links are you running the forwarded session over? It really shouldn't be that terribly slow.