I have what some might consider a trivial use for VNC, but I'd like to get it to work and it's technically interesting to me.

My use case is that I'd like sometimes to be able to control my desktop from my living room while watching tv. The desktop runs Ubuntu, currently 12.04, but that may change soon. I'm using the default Vino server.

I'd like to control it from my IPad and I have a nicely performing WiFi. I got the well-regarded (if reviews can be believed) app Vnc Viewer for the iPad.

It's not working as well as I'd hoped. The problem is the speed of repainting. It's abysmally slow. I can click a close button, walk over to the desktop and see that the window has closed, but on the iPad, the VNC Client won't show the close for minutes if ever. I've noticed that CLOSING windows takes a lot longer to update than to open them.

So the question is is this primarily client or server-caused? And if server-caused what can be done about it? Is Vino the best client or is something else better?

Thanks