Performance Monitor ICA Session

[klines]

We have sporadic slowness on our Citrix server. We have 3 remote offices and 1 office complains of slowness most. All have Full dedicated T1s to the internet with not more than 6 users. I ran Performance Monitor with ICA Session - Latency Session Average. I ran other counters also, but one I found interesting. I found that the slow office is averaging in the 80s, another office is averaging in the 50s and another office is averaging around 15. This is a big difference between the remote offices. Now I have to figure out what this means.

Does anyone know what this tells me. Is the higher number lower latency? How is this calculated?

 

[xs4citrix]

If i compare your figures, to the figures used by citrix, to enable/disable the use of speedscreen, you're not even close:

If latency is greater than 250 milliseconds, set SLR to On.
If latency is between 150 and 250 milliseconds, set SLR to Auto.
If latency is between 50 and 80 milliseconds, set SLR to Off.

I would suggest that you run the following regkey, to fix slow wan connections (the ones having small, but annoying latency)

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Tcpip\Parameters]
"TcpMaxDataRetransmissions"=dword:0000000a

http://www.printingsupport.com

Free citrixprinting support

 

[klines]

I set made this registry change this morning before starting the performance monitor. From your list of milliseconds - which way is better - higher or lower? I am thinking the lower the milliseconds the better and if that's the case each of our remote office falls at the lower tier in your example.

 

[xs4citrix]

>> I set made this registry change this morning before starting the performance monitor <<

Did you reboot, to make sure this one is loaded into memory?

Yes, all your offices have a nice responsetime. According to the citrix SLR document, speedscreen wil not help.

Since the regkey is alreaddy set, i only have 1 more trick left: do you use cisco equipment in this setup?

http://www.printingsupport.com

Free citrixprinting support

 

[klines]

We have a Cisco PIX and Cisco routers.

 

[xs4citrix]

>>We have a Cisco PIX and Cisco routers.<<

The way cisco packet queing is setup, is very important.
Best performance, to my experiences on small wan's is when it's set on &quot;fair queing&quot;
Citrix has a document on this stuff:

http://ctxex10.citrix.com/servlet/KbServlet/download/455-102-7978/Cisco.pdf

http://www.printingsupport.com

Free citrixprinting support

 

[klines]

Thanks. I will try this.

 

[BeerGood]

It may be worthwhile setting up a priority list eg:
priority-list 1 protocol ip high tcp 1494

and setting as a lower priority things like email and printing (if such things are accessed outside of Citrix). I think this may be mentioned in the doco xs4citrix has provided a link for. Speaking of printing, is that done a lot? If so, something like UniPrint or EOL Universal Printer Driver may be worthwhile testing (you can get a free 30 day trial from their websites) even if you're currently using the Citrix UPD.

Also worthwhile making sure that audio/com ports aren't mapped if not required, and also video settings are low if possible. Oh, and enable caching of bitmaps.

If the clients have decent pcs, then you may also want to try using higher compression than the default.

Also, if you currently don't track what's happening on your wan links and don't have any utilities,

http://cricket.sourceforge.net/

is a free system you can setup to provide live graphs of your traffic - might help identify issues......

Finally, another registry setting that might help:

;KeepAlives in order to make the disconnect/reconnect mechanism work
;appropriately. In environments where the TCP/IP network has high
;latency, modifying the operation of the NT TCP/IP stack can improve
;TCP-based ICA sessions. For more information on configurable TCP/IP
;parameters in Windows, see the Microsoft Knowledge Base article
;Q120642, or CTX708444: How to Set TCP Keep Alives so TCP/IP
;To ensure that a host server is quickly aware of dropped sessions, the
;two TCP registry settings listed below can be modified with the following
;moderately aggressive values:
;Key: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet;Services\Tcpip\Parameters
;Value: KeepAliveTime REG_DWORD: 0000ea60
;Value: KeepAliveInterval REG_DWORD: 000003e8
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Tcpip\Parameters]
&quot;KeepAliveTime&quot;=dword:0000ea60
&quot;KeepAliveInterval&quot;=dword:000003e8


Cheers

 

[klines]

We do a lot of printing, and are now looking at Uniprint or Screwdrivers. I haven't heard of EOL UnDriver but will look into it.

Our audio/com ports are not mapped and video settings are low. I'm not sure about the caching of bitmaps - where do you set this?

We do not have any WAN tracking tools - we rely on our ISP to test when we have problems. I will check the cricket website out. How much bandwidth does this take up when monitoring the WAN?

 

[BeerGood]

Ah. In that case, definitely look at the 3rd party utilities. Most have 30 day trials you can use.

Bitmap caching can be set at the client side (program neighborhood/settings/default options or you can edit the ini files). The amount of difference this actually make varies of course depending on the sort of applications you may be accessing via Citrix.

Cricket just uses snmp so the amount of bandwidth is pretty low, even if you have it grab data on a fairly regular basis. There are other apps out there, and it's always possible that there is something else that may be more suitable for your specific setup, but I do know that Cricket works and - of course - the price is right... ;-)

Cheers

 

[terrywilson]

If you are looking at cricket, it is definitely worth looking at MRTG and RRD tools a bit closer. Haven't used cricket before but I gather its just an iteration of MRTG; which is possibly more widely used, so you might have a bit more joy in finding config examples for it

 

[BeerGood]

Yup, Cricket is effectively a front end to RRDtool (

http://people.ee.ethz.ch/~oetiker/webtools/rrdtool/).

Cheers

Richard