Processor Utilization

[mjbrown]

Hey guys, I was wondering if you could help me?
I have several farms, however one of them need to be looked at. We have a group of user who connect to a Metaframe 1.8 SP2 running WINNT TSRV 4.0 SP 6a. We get about 40 users connected to a published app per server running the Web Client over our Intranet via a custom .HTM and .ICA files. As the day prograsses, the CPU performance slowly reaches 100% utilization. As soon as someone launches a full desktop (one of the admins), the CPU Utilization drops to about 25%.
This has got me stumped, I have searched Citrix's knowledgebase as well as the Solution Tools CD to no avail. It could be that I just don't search for the proper information. Any Help you can offer would be greatly appreciated. This site has been a life saver since starting my new job here as Citrix Admin.Thanks for all the help and I will try to answer any questions on the site that I can help with.

 

[CitrixEngineer]

Do you have any users running Java apps? This might account for it.

 

[mjbrown]

We are not using Java. Could there be a problem with Printer and Drive mappings. Of course, I'm just trying to think of anything here. There is nothing goofy running on the servers except a third party app that had no problems in the past. We also were experiencing problems with Citrix Admin opening real slow. Upon investigation, we found that if 'do not participate in IPX' or 'netbios network' are checked this could be an issue if the protocols were installed on the server. We unchecked these and everything was fine (except the current issue). Could these be related? SP3 was supposed to fix this, however we tested on a seperate farm and found this did not help. Any other thoughts with the added info? Thanks C.E. for all the great info on this site. Mike Brown CCA

 

[CitrixEngineer]

Have you tried using perfmon to find out which processes are tying up the CPU?

I have heard of incidents in which the spooler consumed large slices, but never actually seen it.

Unless you need the IPX protocol to communicate with Netware servers, there's very little point in having it installed on the Citrix servers.

What spec is the server (how many processors, what speed, RAM)?

I hope this helps

 

[CitrixEngineer]

Maybe there's something in here that will help;

http://thethin.net/mftunetip.pdf

 

[mjbrown]

The servers are Dells with dual 1.0 ghz processors, and 1.7gb of RAM.
Also, we noticed that the Context Switches/sec were almost 3 x's higher on a box we didn't have a Desktop launched than on those we did. We saw a tech note on this on the Citrix site.
Know what this is, however, not what it means or what to look at to fix it. Mike Brown CCA

 

[mjbrown]

Thanks C.E., how does this sound? We found that if we schedule explorer.exe to automatically start, the problem goes away and Utilization stays low. For a temporary fix, we are adding explorer.exe to the sceduled tasks through the GUI and having it start at startup (these servers get rebooted every night). This will patch the problem, but any thoughts as to the reasons that not having explorer.exe run on a Citrix Server would cause processor utilization to creep up slowly until it reaches 100%? This has been a real problem so far but thankfully we have someone who has spent time researching and documenting the problem.
Any further help wouls be appreciated. Mike Brown CCA