Anyone using Citrix ICA over 64K frame links?

[routerman]

First I should state I dont have any experience of Citrix, but I'm investigating poor respones across a WAN.

The customer has between 4-6 Citrix terminals on a sites, these are connected over 64k frame links to the HQ. Average bandwidth usage over 5 min intervals is around 22k to 25k bps, which I consider pretty low.
However the users complain of poor response time, has anyone here got experience of a similar setup. The Citrix web site does explain some bandwidth reduction techniques, and I've passed these to my customer, any other idea's??

The frame network is set up to rate limit the routers to match the CIR/EIR contracted for, and I have played with compression which has given a small benifit. However the network seems incapable of hitting the WAN at any higher load level.

 

[JohnTcolo]

We had an identical setup across our WAN, we had 6-10 Citrix clients running depending upon the date/time. They also complained of poor performance, espcially while running Microsoft Office products.

We ended up going to 256K and this has resolved the problem. We also restricted printer and video bandwidth within Citrix.

Hope this helps.

 

[routerman]

Thanks for that, my customer mentioned that they were using powerpoint within Citrix, so thats quite relevant.

I've proposed a test using 128k ISDN to see if the increased bandwidth gives more acceptable performance.

 

[MattWray]

We have a similar setup with one site. We have 6 users over a 64k line.
What type of troubles are they having? Is it delayed typing in Outlook, Word, etc?
If so, there is a hotfix you should investigate from MS. We used this and it affected our troubles greatly. Here is the link,

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;324446

Thanks,

Matt Wray
MCSE, MCSA, MCP, CCNA

http://www.sss-steel.com

 

[Ogi]

If you can't afford to upgrade your WAN routes, try using a Packet Shaping box like Packeteer which will prioritise your bandwidth and manage your links more efficiently!

Cheers,
Carl.

 

[Steve Bowman]

What are ALL the ports ICA would be connecting to during the setup thru teardown of a session? I am having an issue across the net that appered shortly after the MSBlast worm that some of my Terminals will no longer connect, the ISP's involved claim they are not blocking any ports however I know some now block several RPC ports like 135. I am wondering if this could be the case here.

Steve Bowman
steve.bowman@ultraex.com

 

[routerman]

I may have traced the problem, looks like mis-matched duplex settings on one of the switches, conected to the server ports.

Thanks for all the useful pointers.

 

[MattWray]

Steveb7
I found this on ICA ports,

Client browses ICA master browser for app: UDP 1604
Client establishes connection with server on which app resides: TCP 1494(by
default)
Client requests communication back on randomly (sort of) chosen High Port
(TCP/UDP gt than 1023).



Thanks,

Matt Wray
MCSE, MCSA, MCP, CCNA

http://www.sss-steel.com

 

[wvgirl64]

Matt Wray,
I am looking at the hotfix you suggested. Did you also turn on the Power Protect option with the Dskcache tool and make all the changes they list in the registry?
Seems like a pretty extensive process. Any problems with it?

 

[MattWray]

I did all the steps, but I didn't need to enable the Power Protect option due to my disks didn't have write-caching enabled. But I did make all the reg hacks on the Citrix boxes and on our file server.
It really is not extensive. The whole process took me about 15 minutes.... Just remember to keep very detailed logs of all registry changes in case you need to go back. But in my case, it did the trick!
Good Luck
Let me know if it works for you too!

Thanks,

Matt Wray
MCSE, MCSA, MCP, CCNA

http://www.sss-steel.com