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Improve citrix receiver performance
Improve citrix receiver performance
We now have staff connecting into our datacenters from a range of different internet connections, from 3G, 4G, Wi-Fi hotspots and broadband. Further to this, if staff are likely using their personal devices to connect in, those devices in some instances could be the latest and greatest Windows 10 or Apple devices that are fully patched running the latest versions of web browsers and Citrix Workspace app.
This is often only a very small percentage of the userbase though, as most devices will run a mixture of operating systems from Windows 10 to Windows 7, and older macOS versions that have not been updated in years.
Staff still expect that if they can connect to their virtual apps and desktops, that the performance they receive is similar to what they were used to when working from the office. That is, minimal lag, a responsive application that also launches quickly, and is available whenever they need it. Audio and video technologies such as Zoom, and Teams have become much more popular due to the pandemic and staff working remotely. People need to stay in touch daily, from having meetings regarding ongoing projects or simply keeping in touch to prevent feeling isolated.
Usage of Teams has more than doubled in recent months, with now over 70 million active users using it around the world. Bandwidth consumption can range from 30kbps to over 1Mbps depending on if you are audio calling or in a group video call. It is important to keep in mind that these multimedia platforms do have the ability to consume more of your available bandwidth , and for those staff members who have lower quality broadband in the home, there could be bandwidth contention with your virtual apps and desktop sessions.
I should also mention the fact that if you have other members in your household streaming or playing online games from a range of devices, those activities will further add to the bandwidth contention of your home broadband. Since the initial months of the pandemic, some restrictions are being lifted across different countries and people are allowed to return back to the office, though often in limited numbers.
Some staff are also returning to the office on a part-time basis, but the change of toolset has created a potential new problem. All these multimedia applications such as Zoom and Microsoft Teams that were adopted for keeping connected, will continue to be used even as staff return to the office.
Because of this, what starts to happen is that gradually a much higher demand is placed on the office network. The more people that return, the higher the bandwidth utilization is likely to be, higher than ever before.
Users will still also obviously continue to launch their virtual apps and desktops whilst in the office, but with the much higher bandwidth contention with peers, the ICA channels could be impacted, causing slow application launches, slow in-session performance and so on.
For example, it could be the end-users home network due to household members using Wi-Fi for streaming and playing video games, leading to bandwidth contention which is impacting the end-users ICA session to their virtual apps and desktops. Maybe it is running on quite old hardware, or there has been a lot of third-party software installed on the device which is causing high RAM or CPU utilisation.
Such problems can impact the launching and in-session ICA performance, however the end-user may report to the helpdesk that Citrix is slow, not knowing that it is caused by their own device. This leads IT down the wrong path from the beginning. Also, staff may now be reporting slowness after a return to the office, with the usage of Zoom and Teams still high, because the network infrastructure was not designed for the larger amount of traffic end-users are now pushing through it.
IT need purpose built monitoring tools to help pinpoint where the issue lies, and to quickly rule out if the issue is not with Citrix at all.
Goliath Performance Monitor for example has such ability to monitor each channel and you can be selective about what channel to investigate when troubleshooting:. In the below example, an end-user reported that their session became slow suddenly and wanted to know what happened. Although many screen refresh issues can be specific to the actual design of the application being used, these settings can help to improve screen refresh and scrolling performance for scenarios such as pass-through sessions and multi-monitor sessions.
The performance of such applications running within Citrix sessions depends largely on the design of the application and the underlying operating system. Therefore, certain applications might perform better in a virtualized environment by drawing graphics directly to the screen rather than using OSS for caching bitmaps. However, at the same time, Internet Explorer 9 does not appear to have the same issue when used in the same scenario.
OSS does provide some bandwidth saving. Hence the fact that an optional server side setting has also been added in the latest versions of XenApp and XenDesktop to disable OSS. Therefore, settings were added in certain Hotfixes for the Virtual Desktop Agent in order to control the maximum number of pixels to scroll per millisecond. This give more control to the customer to determine how much trade off they prefer to make between end user experience and session performance or resources necessary for the session.
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Citrix is Slow, Or Is It!? - Citrix Performance Considerations - - Information
Information This article provides an overview of frequently overlooked or misconfigured settings that can be used to enhance graphics performance in XenDesktop, XenApp, and the Citrix Receiver.
Background Throughout the life of XenApp and XenDesktop, the combination of many factors such as the architecture of the base operating system, graphics device drivers and network bandwidth have been a determining factor in the overall user experience from a graphics quality standpoint.
Adaptive Display Introduced in XenDesktop 5. It is comprised of multiple Citrix policies that tune various graphics settings in relation to an available bandwidth to provide the most optimal end-user experience. Although many screen refresh issues can be specific to the actual design of the application being used, these settings can help to improve screen refresh and scrolling performance for scenarios such as pass-through sessions and multi-monitor sessions.
The performance of such applications running within Citrix sessions depends largely on the design of the application and the underlying operating system. Therefore, certain applications might perform better in a virtualized environment by drawing graphics directly to the screen rather than using OSS for caching bitmaps.
However, at the same time, Internet Explorer 9 does not appear to have the same issue when used in the same scenario. In an environment I worked in recently, we discovered several launch issues which were being caused by heavy NetBIOS traffic on the client devices.
We detected this using a simple Wireshark trace on clients exhibiting the issue and filtering the output to show nbns. The slowness was not just experienced on launch either; if you reset the Citrix Receiver the desktop shortcuts would come back very, very slowly and one at a time rather than all at once.
It appeared that the traffic was related to WPAD. Setting up a WPAD server did resolve the issue but was not required, this issue is best handled by your network team. They should know how to best handle this for your network. Ensure all relevant firewall port settings have been set correctly! Also ensure anti-virus exclusions have been granted both at the server and client level.
This one is a little less black and white. There are of course recommended policies, such as for printing performance but policies are a very org specific thing. A somewhat obvious pointer is to ensure your AD is not a mess! Both from an infrastructure perspective how many domain controllers in your environment, where are they located, are they working well? How about replication? If, say for example you have a tonne of group policies which need to be filtered through on each login, of course this will result in a slow launch for users.
Manage your profiles!! Do not rely on roaming profiles, if a user stores several GB of data in their profile it roams with them. Each time they launch a Citrix session that brings them to a new machine it will result in that data being brought across the wire for that user. Not only resulting in a slow login for that particular user but also possibly causing slowness for other users too.
The above is just one video but this tool can help with managing user data and also even optimize application performance with neat process priority management! This can ensure your critical applications keep humming along even if the resources on a server are being taxed.
For example, it could be the end-users home network due to household members using Wi-Fi for streaming and playing video games, leading to bandwidth contention which is impacting the end-users ICA session to their virtual apps and desktops. Maybe it is running on quite old hardware, or there has been a lot of third-party software installed on the device which is causing high RAM or CPU utilisation.
Such problems can impact the launching and in-session ICA performance, however the end-user may report to the helpdesk that Citrix is slow, not knowing that it is caused by their own device. This leads IT down the wrong path from the beginning. Also, staff may now be reporting slowness after a return to the office, with the usage of Zoom and Teams still high, because the network infrastructure was not designed for the larger amount of traffic end-users are now pushing through it.
IT need purpose built monitoring tools to help pinpoint where the issue lies, and to quickly rule out if the issue is not with Citrix at all. Goliath Performance Monitor for example has such ability to monitor each channel and you can be selective about what channel to investigate when troubleshooting:. In the below example, an end-user reported that their session became slow suddenly and wanted to know what happened.
Upon review, we can see that the end-user experienced a sudden spike in network latency, which caused the ICA latency to jump up.
Finally, in this example, an end-user similar to the scenario before encountered a sudden spike in ICA RTT latency, but this time it was not actually anything user-side which caused the problem. This eliminates any doubt over the end-user connection, which can also be tracked under Network Latency and appears to be very stable throughout.
Remote working, and higher usage of multimedia solutions are here to stay. If the issue is isolated to an individual application process or it is determined that any session from a particular client is unresponsive, Citrix Technical Support may ask that the client side processes or the application process be dumped, How to use the Userdump. Generally, Network Traces do not help in situations where the session is already hung. Certain application may misbehave ONLY in a seamless session.
Again, do earlier or later clients affect the behavior of the session s? The following statement from the 6. In depth troubleshooting, as previous outlined, is needed to make such determinations. If a user opened a new window or menu item repeatedly, the operating system's Graphical Device Interface GDI resources were reduced, and eventually, when GDI Resources were depleted, the operating system became unstable. GDI resource areas keep track of items that the operating system uses to draw graphics: pens, brushes, fonts, palettes, and so on.
Each time a window is opened, it receives an allocation of GDI resources. When the window is closed, these GDI resources are released, freeing memory in the GDI resource area for other applications and windows. The client now properly tracks the GDI brush resource, releasing its allocated memory when windows are closed.
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