Tips & Tricks

Optimizing memory consumption for RDP sessions in Remote Desktop Manager

Learn how to optimize memory consumption for RDP sessions in Remote Desktop Manager. Follow our detailed guide to configure settings and reduce memory usage, ensuring efficient and stable remote connections.

Maurice Côté

Still a software developer at heart, I am the products VP at Devolutions, tasked with helping our corporate customers in using our products efficiently, and making sure that our products fulfill their needs by monitoring our workspace in the IT industry. I have worked many years in the Medical Software field, and was 'that' Dev who was always taking care of the network infrastructure because... well... we could not afford to hire an IT guy. This makes me especially in tune with the business requirements of IT staff. Some would say I know just enough to be dangerous, but that's another story...

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Hello RDMers

As seen in a previous blog of ours: 32 bit vs. 64 bit versions of Remote Desktop Manager, RDP sessions using version 8 of the protocol, namely Windows 8 and Windows 2012, consume more memory than previous versions of the protocol. For those of you that open many sessions concurrently, this sometimes forced you to use the 64 bit version of Remote Desktop Manager.

Thanks to our friend Marc-André Moreau of AwakeCoding, the creator of FreeRDP (which we use in our Mac edition), we can give you a trick to reduce the memory footprint of those sessions. He has discovered that, by default, the RDP protocol will reserve a sizable chunk of memory right from the start of a session for caching purposes, but we have some level of control over that.In the Experience tab of the RDP session, there is a Cache setting that you can use to control the behavior. It's values are as follows:

  1. Default: uses the value set in File - Options - Types - RDP - Cache
  2. Full Mode: The protocol is full Windows 8 Remote Desktop protocol.
  3. Thin client: The protocol is limited to using the Windows 7 with SP1 RemoteFX codec and a smaller cache. All other codecs are disabled. This protocol has the smallest memory footprint.
  4. Small cache: The protocol is the same as FullMode, except it uses a smaller cache.

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Choosing Thin client is therefore the choice that limits memory consumption the most, but will downgrade to the previous version of the protocol. You could try the Small Cache mode to see if its sufficient for your needs.

Obviously, if you wish to set this for all sessions, use File - Options to assign the default value, then in all of your sessions use Default. There you go, a nice hidden gem that gives us control over how the RDP protocol operates.

As always, let us know your thoughts by using the comment feature.

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