That's interesting to hear, because my experience is that I really really _want_ to use Remote Desktop / Screen Sharing but the performance has gotten worse and worse over macOS releases, and it currently abysmal over gigabit, and even 10-gigabit, wired Ethernet. (I could not see any difference between 1Gbps and 10Gbps which made me think bandwidth is not the problem).
I'd love for this to be some flaw in my own setup, though.
I used to use this setup circa Mac OS X 10.6 and it worked very well (1Gbps wired connection). I could leave my home office and screen share in from the living room via my MacBook Pro from the living room, when I had to watch my kids or whatever.
Today, I don't even try that. Command-Tab lags, yes, but almost everything lags to the point of being super-annoying to use. Even typing lags. I also have a Windows box in my office, and this setup basically works (even from my MBP). So I've been assuming this is one of those features that Apple has let degrade to the point of unusability.
But am I wrong? I'd like to be. Are others using Screen Sharing or Remote Desktop on macOS with success beyond like click... wait... click... whew I got a system update installed? I mean, for like typing emails or coding?
(One thing I'd been thinking of debugging was whether my office Mac having 3 5K screens is an issue — I am only trying to screenshare one of them, but maybe they have a bug or something where total pixels of the host kill perf even if those pixels aren't being shared.)
One issue I had is that it was constantly using the WiFi connection instead of the wired one. So I created a shortcut where I replaced the hostname with the wired IP address, this solved a lot of problems for me.
For my usecase of development, it works fine. No noticable lag, even as I type this comment, also video calls and web browsing/scolling/youtube are fluid on 2560x1440 using around 7MB/s.
With 3 5K screen I could image video memory or some GPU bandwidth being an issue, limiting the screensharing although sharing only 1 screen. But the problem must be either one of lag or one of bandwidth. Maybe try measuring network throughput and ping?
Maybe try using a 3rd party remote desktop system with focus on performance instead of the standard vnc server included in mac? Parsec might work for your use case. The disadvantage is these kind of remote desktop system achieve the performance by utilizing lossy codecs instead of lossless compression used by vnc, so you might notice some banding/artefacts depending on your network condition / compression level. The advantage is the hardware encoding/decoding is very fast, even fast enough for gaming.
I'd love for this to be some flaw in my own setup, though.
I used to use this setup circa Mac OS X 10.6 and it worked very well (1Gbps wired connection). I could leave my home office and screen share in from the living room via my MacBook Pro from the living room, when I had to watch my kids or whatever.
Today, I don't even try that. Command-Tab lags, yes, but almost everything lags to the point of being super-annoying to use. Even typing lags. I also have a Windows box in my office, and this setup basically works (even from my MBP). So I've been assuming this is one of those features that Apple has let degrade to the point of unusability.
But am I wrong? I'd like to be. Are others using Screen Sharing or Remote Desktop on macOS with success beyond like click... wait... click... whew I got a system update installed? I mean, for like typing emails or coding?
(One thing I'd been thinking of debugging was whether my office Mac having 3 5K screens is an issue — I am only trying to screenshare one of them, but maybe they have a bug or something where total pixels of the host kill perf even if those pixels aren't being shared.)