I should look into it, but I don’t know whether or not X11 provides for any kind of video compression when updating regions of the screen. I only ever use this over a an 802.11g LAN so even if there is no video compression I don’t notice any lag. I haven’t tried using it over the Internet, but I am guessing it would probably be a bit slow.
The performance isn’t the best, when compared to RDP. Protocols like RDP can take shortcuts by treating it more as an image then a fully remote rendering, like image compression techniques. For tunneling an X-window over SSH, the compression option you have is with the connection, itself. Using say, ssh -CX or ssh -CY allows ssh to compress the connection for better performance, but that compression able to do lossy image compression. The killer will be latency. If it’s over a highly latent connection, like a WAN or satellite, it will be rough. But on a wired lan, or decent local wifi, it’s pretty all right.
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