Remote Desktop Slow - WAN

[snootalope]

Hello

I'm trying to figure out what the deal is with RDP and why it's so darn slow. I've got a number of terminal/citrix servers that are accessed remotely from the internet. Our backbone is a two T1 bonded link, so plenty of bandwidth.

Users that connect with RDP, it's slow. Takes forever to do anything.

Users that conenct via Citrix (ica), nice and quick.

Both protocol's are setup the same on the servers, resolution, color, all that stuff. There's no special QoS configured on the WAN for either. ICA is just faster then RDP.

Anyone have any idea why? I know ICA has some compression, but that's just more overhead. Anyway to make our beloved microsoft application run faster?

 

[JJDiver]

Has anyone configured the Experience tab under Options on RDP for something other than Dialup 56K?

I would bet you have checked all the options, but sometimes settings magically change. If someone has played with the options, enabled Desktop Background (for example), this might cause RDP to run slow.

Jeff

 

[JimWells]

Has anything else on the network changed? Te MTU size, for example? RDP is not the same protocol as ICA and takes upa larger chunk of bandwidth...

 

[snootalope]

No, nothings changed on the network side and no one has messed with the Experience tab. The client that all our remote users use is embedded in an SSL/VPN device. Unfortunately, the ssl device doesn't give any options as far as color depth and what not.

So, the only control I really have is configuring the local RDP options on the terminal server itself.

 

[kmcferrin]

For starters, the Citrix client is a little thinner than standard Microsoft RDP. That could make a small difference.

You mentioned that they're not loading the RDP client locally on their PC, but instead they're running the client from the SSL/VPN device. What sort of device is it? And is Citrix also being run from that device or are they using nFuse?

If they're running them separately, then the device is probably the bottleneck. I've seen a couple of systems like this that let you "publish" applications to an SSL encrypted web page for remote access, but they all seem fairly slow to me.

 

[snootalope]

The SSL/VPN device provides clientless access for users outside of our network through an SSL protected page. Once signed in by accessing this page, the users sessions to our terminal server are all done through an SSL device. RDP is run from the SSL device to the term server.

You could be right, the SSL device might be to blame. I'll have to do some more research and testing on it to ensure that's the issue.

 

[SuperJenks]

Do you use logmein.com on any of your servers for remote management? There is currently an issue with using logmein.com client and RDP on the same server. It will be slow and unstable. Its a long shot but figured it was worth asking.

 

[snootalope]

nope, no logmein.com - never heard of it.

After doing some more testing and talking to the users that are complaining of being slow I think I might have found something. Both users have Norton Internet Security. Don't know about anyone else, but in my entire time in IT, I've never once found Norton to work nicely with anything other than itself. Just an opinion..... anyway, I bet that's the problem so I'm going to pursue that beings access speed seems to be just fine for other users NOT using Norton.