Server graphics card question

[Tubes]

How important is the quality of the graphics card on the server?
We run a Published Desktop with an Oracle application on 4 Compaq DL580 1.8/2000 servers to approximately 90 concurrent users to remote sites. we've always had problems with strange colors appearing from time to time, but a recent release of JInitiator appears to have reduced this issue.
The problem that seems to have hung around is slow screen building (some users use caching, some don't). This will cause the screen to lock and require a reset for the server to release the session.
One thing that We've found is that if someone from the main office shadows a remote user, their speed and screen issues vanish. As soon as you stop shadowing, their performance crawls to a stop again and the blocking resumes.
The servers are using the on-board ATI graphics card (2 or 4 mb, I can't remember off the top of my head), and we wondered that if we upgraded to higher memory PCI graphics cards would do us any good.
Not understanding how session shadowing worked, it seems that the shadow session seems to give it the boost that it needs to perform efficiently. Are we drawing outside the lines on this or is there some validity in our thoughts? Any assistance is appreciated and TIA

 

[enigma99]

Tubes,
Very good question.
The graphics card on the server end DO NOT help any when it comes to displaying on the client end.
The remote screen updates are handled by Citrix's thinwire virtual channel.

If you are seeing issues with refresh rates or hanging during a session....you probably want to look more along the line of packet shaping or bandwidth allocation for the ICA protocol.

You can also help out these issues out by tweaking the thin client or fat client side.
In the past, I've come across old fat clients with slow Hard drives that had caching enabled on the PN application. This slowed down the client to a crawl and we finally disabled caching on the client so it wouldn't search its slow hard drive.

Thin clients are probably the best option and find out how fast it processes ICA packets and stuff (get this from your local vendor).

Hope that helps.

 

[Tubes]

Thank for that bit of info, but what would be the reasoning for the problem to disappear once shadowing starts and and return once it's stopped?

 

[enigma99]

Tubes,
Another good question.
I've had this same behavior before when trying to troubleshoot performance issues (screen refresh issues).

Here is an article regarding that exact same behavior.

http://www.msterminalservices.org/articles/Setting-Citrix-shadowing.html

Look under "Performance Trigger" section.

Hope that helps.