ConnectWise Tech Talk: software update in ConnectWise Control

Posted:
08/22/2019
| By:
Max Booth

The ConnectWise Control® team is thrilled to share some exciting performance updates.

What We’ve Changed

We’re proud of ConnectWise Control’s exceptional speed, but it’s been some time since the last update to our screen rendering algorithms and encoders. Because of this, we noticed some occasional lag and latency issues with the display.

On a computer display, both synthetic (computer-generated) and photographic (gradated) images will appear on your desktop. Using a generic algorithm to power both, however, can lead to a less-than-ideal experience. Therefore, how we encode the image data depends a lot on what is being captured.

Here are some of the wrinkles we focused on smoothing out in Control’s .NET client:

  • The old ConnectWise Control screen was treated as a grid and relied on a lot of guesswork to determine which parts of the grid were synthetic or photographic before processing them.
  • This guesswork required a lot of computation—and sometimes, the guesses were wrong, which led to an even larger loss of performance.
  • Video playback left behind computer artifacts—blank boxes that impeded the imagery and caused the screen to ‘freeze.’

The Mac client was a little different. There was no switching between synthetic and photographic at all, which caused even more performance issues.

Clearly, it was time for an upgrade.

What you’ll see moving forward

We realized that if we can better recognize the type of image being processed, we can improve the quality of the output. With this update, ConnectWise Control’s .NET client will be using better metrics to accurately pick the appropriate encoders, no matter the situation. The Mac client also got an update. In addition to receiving the same algorithmic updates applied to the .NET client, the Mac client will now only render the parts of the screen that are ‘dirty’ (areas of the screen that have changed) instead of the entire view. Both the .NET and Mac clients are using newer, more robust encoders.

These newer encoders will display images clearly on your screen and ensure optimal performance. Partners can expect to see up to a 140% performance increase on .NET clients, and Mac clients are up to 10x faster. You may notice slightly larger file sizes and increased memory storage—but we’ve kept these changes minimal so you can enjoy the benefits of this software upgrade without experiencing roadblocks to using ConnectWise Control.