Slow Published App on some Clients

[tode]

Environment
Server
Windows 2000 SP2
Metaframe 1.8 SP2

PC's Dell Dimension 8100
Win2000 Pro SP2
P4 256 mb ram
32MB Nvidia Geforce2 MX
3com 3c905 NIC
Citrix Client 6.01.963

We have an application called Smart Team which is a document server. Using the smartteam app users can right click a document and view the the document with excel or word.

I have several near identical PC's that give very different results when launching Excel via Smart Team.

Some PC's will spawn the excel application in a matter of seconds. The others take up to 10 minutes. The slow PC's will launch Excel standalone, and Smart Team standalone and they work fine, only when used in conjunction with one anther are the load times slow. But the slow PC's can launch word via smart team in a matter of seconds.

I have noticed that the outgoing bytes on the slow PC's are sending up to 4mb whereas the PC's that are fast send only 28k.

Things I have tried:

Connecting the slow pc's to the same port as a fast pc on the switch. Didn't help

Republishing the app. Didn't help

Patching the PC's to the latest Service release for Win200, Office 2000, Citrix Client, Video Drivers. Didn't help

Accessing the application from the servers desktop. Didn't help.


Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks

 

[CitrixEngineer]

It's unlikely to be anything to do with the computers - more likely something to do with the user profiles.

Do all your users have roaming Terminal Server profiles? If so, check that user data files are not being stored inside.

Is it always the same users OR always the same computers?

Hope this helps

 

[tode]

Profiles are on the actual citrix server. I just logged in as me on the one of the slow PC's and got the same results.

 

[CitrixEngineer]

I take it back - it must be something to do with the PC configuration - if you can use your own roaming profile on 2 different PCs and get 2 different results, then there's really nothing else it can be.

When you say that your profiles are "on the actual Citrix Server", do you mean that you have set your roaming profiles path to the Citrix Server? That's got to be a bit of a performance hit.

The only other thing I can think of is that maybe some computers pick up a local copy of Word or Excel instead of the server copy - that would cause massive data transfers - which is something ICA was specifically not designed for.

Use Filemon from

http://www.sysinternals.com

(out of hours, preferably) to see where bottlenecks are occurring.

Hope this helps

 

[tode]

That is strange. The slow down is caused by smartteam. Some of the clients are launching excel locally. I don't know why but at least I know what is happening now.

As for the profiles that is for another day.



Thanks