How to fix horrible performance of Java apps in Remote Desktop

Raymond Chen has a great article about developer "taxes". One of the taxes is making sure your app works well in Remote Desktop. Java apps are notoriously bad about getting details like these right. IntelliJ and NetBeans (probably two of the top three IDEs) perform so horribly over Remote Desktop that they're basically unusable.

I tracked the problem down to a Java property that disables use of DirectDraw. A lot of Java apps seem to do this due to a poor implementation in earlier versions of java (*sigh*). Fortunately, there's an easy fix -- the property can be changed by adding this to the command line:

-J-Dsun.java2d.noddraw=false

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