Comment by wmwmwm

With lockdown keeping me at home, and having to RDP to work over a VPN, I've gone quite far down the rabbit hole this year experimenting with low latency keyboards (1000Hz USB polling, configurable debounce times), gaming mice and high refresh rate monitors (125Hz+), all to try and make my remote experience feel more local.

The threshold for me (and most people I think) is about 110ms between key strike and something appearing on the screen before something feels non-local and disembodied... which is good because I found I could get down to ~40ms local response time on a decent windows box. My 2015 macbook is about ~120ms for the terminal app.

That leaves 70ms latency budget to play with which can accommodate the the RDP overhead (~50ms) and the network hop (~10ms for me).

This whole journey started with me wondering if I should pay a small fortune for a better network connection, before I realised that most of the latency was in my keyboard and monitor!

I even built a Arduino Leonardo gadget to measure the lag systematically and some pcap software to spot the RDP packets on the wire. The code's pretty shoddy but it does the trick! You can see it and an example result with RDP here:

https://github.com/willmuldrew/lagmeter

Another big factor in the experience is jitter - so it's a good idea to ensure everything is plugged in if you can. Mice, keyboards and ethernet.

In essence, even if you have to RDP/remote into work, potentially you can still make it feel pretty local - don't give up hope!