I sometimes am forced to work away from my office, meaning that I need to VPN into my lab. I\'ve noticed that remote-debugging with Eclipse in this situation is horrendously slo
Have you tried this? http://www.gontu.org/how-you-can-debug-a-remote-java-application/
It sounds like you need to set this up in order to debug your application through VPN. This, by the way, has been answer as well in this SO posting.
I hope this helps your case. Good luck!