Notes 6 (best 6.0.2) on a windows desktop on citrix XP FR2

[lrussier2675]

Hi,

I'm looking for someone who publish Lotus Notes 6 (best 6.0.2) on a windows desktop on citrix XP FR2.

We have big problems of slowness during starts of Lotus: when several users starts Lotus in the same time (almost 15-20 persons), servers are freezing during some seconds.

Note: servers are bi-pro 2,2Ghz, 4 Go of RAM.

Thanks for you help.

 

[MattWray]

Is it only in Lotus? We have a similar problem, addressed in

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?kbid=324446.

It has a pause for Terminal Servers. I am applying the hotfix this weekend, I'll let you know how it goes. If this sounds like your problem also....

Thanks,

Matt Wray
MCSE, MCSA, MCP, CCNA

http://www.sss-steel.com

 

[BeerGood]

It is quite likely/possible that the problem may be being caused by the issue noted by mattwray.

If this doesn't help, though, I'd check the stats of the server to see if there are any other issues there. For example, load up perfmon, let it run during the day and make note of the times when the server appears to hang. Check the log around these times for potential causes eg %Disk Time and Average Disk Queue Length. When these go over 100% or 1.0 respectively, you will find that the speed at which the server is able to retrieve data from the local hard drive is probably becoming a bottleneck. Once it goes over about 150%/1.5 respectively, there will almost certainly be noticable degradation. If disk performance is the cause, then other than getting faster drives there are a number of things you can do to help improve things eg run a "defrag" on the server (whilst no-one's on it of course), create a separate swap file partition, etc. Other things such as disk cache, drive tuning, resolving network issues (eg you can get pauses when the server nic is running at 100mb/full duplex and the switch it's plugged into thinks it is running at half duplex) etc have no doubt been described elsewhere in other threads.

Cheers

 

[victorv]

hi,
for simple LotusNotes appls (as e-mail), someone uses
WEB access to mail: can this is a workaround ?
bye

 

[lrussier2675]

Hi,

We have partially resolved the problem.
We now add 3 servers more with load balancing, and it seems to work better.
But now, we have 15-18 users per server... and Citrix sells us 40-50 users per server! Hummm...
In fact, we found that it's Notes which causes problems. When several users start Notes, every user connected on the server are freezing during seconds.
Lotus says us that Notes 6.0.2 is approved for citrix. Hummm...

For victorv, we didn't test WEB Access.

bye.

 

[BeerGood]

The number of users that can be supported on a single Citrix server varies wildly depending on the hardware, the applications being accessed, and the activity level of each user. The 40-50 user level quoted by Citrix is an average - a server that is being used to publish a single small app might support hundreds of concurrent users, whilst one that's being used to publish something massive might only support 20 or less active users.

Although you didn't mention what sort of drives you have, your server specs otherwise appear to be fine and should be able to support more users. It really sounds like an issue with either the hard drives (too slow) or network card (clashing with drive controller, duplex, etc).

Why do I say that? Well, Notes is a fairly large app so when you start it, it needs to read a lot of data off the local hard drive. If you have a lot of people doing this at the same time, the drive needs to be pretty fast. The Notes client also needs to drag data from the remote Notes server - so again the network connection needs to be able to handle this. If the local hard drive is ok, and people don't normally have slow response times from the Notes server outside of Citrix, then there may be an issue with the nic in the Citrix server.

Defrag the server
Check the duplex settings of the network card in the server versus the settings on the switch it's connected to.
Check the write-back cache settings of the drives
Check the system logs for errors
Run perfmon as suggested
Check out that fix noted by Mattwray

Cheers
P.S. I'd also check to make sure that the performance settings on the server haven't been changed to favour background processes.

 

[terrywilson]

We have been doing some testing as we are thinking about moving to Notes 6 from 5 and the Notes 6 client seems to be more demanding on the systmes (Although I have noticed that it seems to average about 12mb of RAM as opposed to 20MB for Notes 5...).