Xpra: Ticket #1911: poor batch delay spirals out of control

Opening ticket after this discussion on IRC.

Using 2.3.2 on Ubuntu 16.04 and 18.04 over wifi, 1Gb/s ethernet and local I see performance which starts out as fairly poor and then spirals rapidly out of control.

Have attached bug report tool output from the 18.04 machine used in local mode (mmap enabled.)



Sat, 07 Jul 2018 21:25:01 GMT - tc424: attachment set

stats log over ethernet to 14.04 server


Sat, 07 Jul 2018 21:29:48 GMT - tc424: attachment set

Bug report tool output


Sat, 07 Jul 2018 21:38:59 GMT - tc424: attachment set

xpra info output for local connection on 18.04


Sat, 07 Jul 2018 21:53:02 GMT - tc424: attachment set

stats log for local connection on 18.04


Sat, 07 Jul 2018 22:16:53 GMT - tc424:

Please read "16.04" where I've written "14.04" above - heat has turned my brain to jelly :(


Sun, 08 Jul 2018 04:45:57 GMT - Antoine Martin: owner changed; milestone set

The problem comes from the congestion detection code, but I would have expected you to see notifications alerting you to the problem (as per #1855). You can disable the detection with: XPRA_BANDWIDTH_DETECTION=0 (server side) and the problems will go away. But it would be better if you could post the -d bandwidth output so we can figure out why the code thinks that your bandwidth is limited, so we can fix the root cause instead. Wifi and LAN should give different results, you may want to try the beta builds here: https://xpra.org/beta/ to take advantage of the new network adapter detection code, which tolerates latency jitter on wireless links.


Sun, 08 Jul 2018 09:10:07 GMT - tc424: attachment set

log for local connection with congestion logging on


Sun, 08 Jul 2018 10:01:20 GMT - tc424: attachment set

log of XPRA_BANDWIDTH_DETECTION=0 xpra start -d stats,bandwidth --start=xfce4-terminal


Sun, 08 Jul 2018 10:15:55 GMT - Antoine Martin: description changed

The batch delay increased rapidly because of congestion events and bandwidth limits:

2018-07-07 21:38:09,208 update_batch_delay: bandwidth-limit              : 6.77,45.88  {'used': 32245920, 'budget': 5242880}
2018-07-07 21:38:09,209 update_batch_delay: congestion                   : 1.87,8.74  {}

And sometimes also because of client-latency:

2018-07-07 21:38:23,080 update_batch_delay: client-latency               : 2.86,0.69  {'target': 8, 'weight_multiplier': 503, 'smoothing': 'sqrt', 'aim': 800, 'aimed_avg': 8178, 'div': 1000, 'avg': 233, 'recent': 446}

And to a lesser extent the client decode speed:

2018-07-07 21:38:27,286 update_batch_delay: client-decode-speed          : 2.15,4.59  {'avg': 131, 'recent': 449}

This all points towards a network / CPU performance bottleneck on the client.


You can now turn off bandwidth detection more easily, see #1912.

With this turned off, it should now be impossible to get update_batch_delay: congestion to raise the batch delay since the congestion-value should always be zero. (it is calculated from the congestion_send_speed list which is only updated in record_congestion_event and this method is bypassed when bandwidth detection is turned off).

This won't fix the massive jitter you are seeing though:


Sun, 08 Jul 2018 21:39:01 GMT - tc424:

Just updating to note that it looks like some / all of this problem is to do with having the "Session Info" window open.


Mon, 09 Jul 2018 15:00:32 GMT - Antoine Martin:

Just updating to note that it looks like some / all of this problem is to do with having the "Session Info" window open.

We had similar problems in the past where "xpra info" (which collects the same information as the session info dialog) would slow down the system too much: and since this is used for diagnostics, trying to identify a problem would actually create new ones and hide the real cause.

The session info dialog requests updated information from the server every second. Some of the data collected needs access to the UI and does so from the UI thread.

This regression may have been caused by the more modular code refactoring of #1761. If that's the case, the problem should mostly go away if you downgrade to 2.1 or even 1.0


Tue, 25 Sep 2018 06:00:58 GMT - Antoine Martin: priority changed

Lowering priority: the workaround is to close the session info window.


Thu, 12 Dec 2019 08:51:30 GMT - Antoine Martin:

Does it still spiral out of control?

There are many mitigations in newer versions.


Wed, 04 Nov 2020 11:06:11 GMT - Antoine Martin: status changed; resolution set


Sat, 23 Jan 2021 05:37:04 GMT - migration script:

this ticket has been moved to: https://github.com/Xpra-org/xpra/issues/1911