Intermittent slowdowns

[TexExpat]

I am experiencing a problem with sessions almost hanging at times. All keyboard and mouse input is cached and then performed, but sometimes there is a delay of 30 seconds or longer. This seems to occur on one server in particular, but all my servers tend to have delays of a second or two at times. At other times, there is no delay.

My servers are all quad processors with 3 GB of RAM. I have not seen more than 16-18 users on any server at one time. This problem seems to occur more often when there are over a dozen or so users, but I have seen it happen with only two or three users logged in. I am running MetaFrame XP, FR3 on Windows 2000, SP3.

Does anyone have any idea what might be causing this and what I might need to do to correct it?

Thank you very much for your help.

 

[DDILL]

You need to first identify the cause. It is most likely either a CPU or network problem you are having. Network will be a little troubleshooting on your side to determine if you have a bad cable, NIC setting, etc.
If it is CPU which it sounds like it may be, you should look at a performance management tool. I do not want to market some utility out there so I will list 3 viable options. 1st option is free, we all like that. You can look into threadmaster. Threadmaster is a quick and dirty CPU management utility that is available for download. If you are looking for a utility with support and better managebility you may want to look at Aurema's Armtech or Appsense. There are other competitors to those two but honestly I would not recommend waisting your time.
To give you a good understanding of how these tools can help I will give you a scenerio I had. My users where running an application that utilized 100% of one CPU. I also had some quad cpu servers and some 6 CPU. I could handle roughly 7 users on the server running these applications before it came to a halt. With the Aurema product we now hold 50 users per system with that particular app.

 

[mjbianco15]

Brian Madden published this white paper "Terminal Server Performance Tuning"...it offers an entire section for troubleshooting random pauses and slowness:

http://www.rtosoft.com/pages/whitepaper_ts_fbm.asp

 

[DDILL]

Just watch what Brian Madden talks about in refference to T-scale. T-scale is not very powerful compared to some of the other tools I mentioned.

 

[mjbianco15]

I agree...we tried RTO and for some slowdown issues and didn't see any real difference. The paper was just sponsered by RTO; however, it does you some tips on how to isolate slowness problems and does offer some performance hacks and changes which may help.

 

[TexExpat]

Thank you all very much for your replies. I appreciate the specific recommendations of utilities and will look into those mentioned and do some performance checking and tuning. I also appreciate the reference to the white paper. I have downloaded it and am printing it out as I write this.

However, I reviewed my post and see that I failed to mention that I had looked at the Performance tab of the Windows Task Manager. It did not indicate the CPU being maxed out. While this extreme slowdown was going on, the worst CPU load I saw was all four CPU's peaking at about 25%. Often, the CPU's were barely registering any activity on this tool. I know that this is not a very comprehensive tool, and I intend to use one of the utilities mentioned above to verify, but I thought that I would have seen more of a spike even on that tool if the CPU was the bottleneck.

 

[KCDave03]

maybe you are witnessing a network latency problem. I have seen that some of our clients have this issue and I think it may have something to do with quality of service (QOS). I was made aware of it through the Resource Manager monitoring.

 

[DDILL]

You mentioned 25% usage. Is this a quad machine or maybe a dual with hyperthreading? Reason I ask is it seems like it may be impacting one cpu.

 

[xs4citrix]

Do you run the disks in a raid?
If so which, and how is the read/write cache setup on the controller?

http://www.printingsupport.com

Free citrixprinting support

 

[jsbleach]

Just a thought i just ran across a slow down problem which cam down to 2000 sp3 i believe, I had to call microsoft to E-mail the hot fix and solved the problem.

 

[TexExpat]

Thank you very much for your replies.

The servers have dual CPU's that are seen by the OS as quad CPU's (each CPU appears to the OS as 2 CPU's). The disks are in a RAID with write back cache enabled.

Jsbleach, do you know what hot fix you needed?

Thank you again very much for your help.

 

[mitchero]

This is the MS HotFix (324446)

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

Terminal Server and Connected Terminal Services Clients Pause When a Terminal Services Client Logs On or Logs Off

 

[tina2]

Has anyone tried this hotfix? I am having these exact symptoms, so I called M$ for the download. It is one of those "not regression tested" hotfixes, so you have to call & ask for it.

Anyone have any problems with it?

Kristine