I've been using X11 forwarding to "seamlessly" work on two machines at the same time and it's been working great. The one issue that I'm having is that the connection can be quite slow for some applications and I would like to speed it up. Since both machines are on my private home network I don't really care about the connection being secure, so my first approach was to either disable encryption or switching to a weaker cipher.
After a google search I found that I could get noticeably better performance by enabling trusted X11 forwarding (-Y) and compression (-C). However it appears that the weak but fast ciphers (arcfour and blowfish) have been removed from openssh a few versions ago.
So my questions are?
- Is it possible to enable/install these ciphers?
- If not, which of the currently available ciphers are the fastest?
- Are there any other settings that can be adjusted to speedup the connection?
EDIT: The remote pc is running Ubuntu 20.04 and the local is running Pop!_OS 19.10 (Based on Ubuntu 19.10). Both use GDM3 as their window manager.
-listen tcp
, but the hard part is finding where your distribution and display manager has hidden it. Add those two details to your post above.aes128-gcm@openssh.com
is the fastest cipher on modern x86-64 processors, but unless you have a network faster than gigabit, every secure encryption/MAC pair is fast enough.