In order to reduce the possibility of the slowness being caused by your Citrix setup, there are a few recommended settings that in my experience can improve performance:. I was recently asked why the above settings should be set. For example, directing traffic handling to use the hosts CPU rather than using the network stack resources. Without RSS it could be artificially limited. Changing these settings requires a reboot. Similarly, if possible also ensure Citrix Single Sign-on is first in the Provider Order on the clients.
Many vendors will recommend their product be top of the order, so this may not be possible. Setting this on end user devices will likely need to be set centrally, this can be done via the registry e. Again, a reboot will be required.
This can also be set via Group Policy. Citrix provide a list of recommended Citrix and Microsoft hotfixes which can be crucially important. In an environment I worked in recently, we discovered several launch issues which were being caused by heavy NetBIOS traffic on the client devices. We detected this using a simple Wireshark trace on clients exhibiting the issue and filtering the output to show nbns. The slowness was not just experienced on launch either; if you reset the Citrix Receiver the desktop shortcuts would come back very, very slowly and one at a time rather than all at once.
It appeared that the traffic was related to WPAD. Setting up a WPAD server did resolve the issue but was not required, this issue is best handled by your network team. They should know how to best handle this for your network. Ensure all relevant firewall port settings have been set correctly! Also ensure anti-virus exclusions have been granted both at the server and client level. This one is a little less black and white.
There are of course recommended policies, such as for printing performance but policies are a very org specific thing. A somewhat obvious pointer is to ensure your AD is not a mess! Both from an infrastructure perspective how many domain controllers in your environment, where are they located, are they working well?
How about replication? If, say for example you have a tonne of group policies which need to be filtered through on each login, of course this will result in a slow launch for users. Manage your profiles!! Do not rely on roaming profiles, if a user stores several GB of data in their profile it roams with them.
Each time they launch a Citrix session that brings them to a new machine it will result in that data being brought across the wire for that user. Not only resulting in a slow login for that particular user but also possibly causing slowness for other users too.
The above is just one video but this tool can help with managing user data and also even optimize application performance with neat process priority management! This can ensure your critical applications keep humming along even if the resources on a server are being taxed. For the love of god, do not use Active Setup with your applications! This is a guest post from George Spiers. How often have you heard that from your end users? You see, the performance of such deployments depends on the health of many different components and layers.
We had a great response, with more than 1, registrations and more than tuning in on the day of the webinar. We focused the content of the webinar on providing three sample scenarios where Citrix is slow.
In each case, we discussed two troubleshooting approaches: one where you had access to free tools such as Citrix Director and another where you had access to third-party tools such as Goliath Performance Monitor.
A misconfiguration was performed during the upgrade, resulting in 40, clinicians and staff being unable to access the application. Such a widescale fault in the delivery of MEDITECH would put intense pressure on the IT department and Citrix administrators — they were now dealing with a major incident with serious implications on providing patient care. Typically, the Citrix administrator will manually try to launch MEDITECH to see if an error message was displayed and if that error message was coming from the application itself or the Citrix environment.
If no useful error message were displayed, you would check Citrix Director to see if there were any failed VDAs or if there were failed connections being logged and what the error messages recorded were. Director will also show basics around Delivery Controller service health, license server health, and any Hypervisor alerts.
This issue was detected during the manual attempted launch of MEDITECH by a Citrix administrator, but it could also have been reported by an end user during triaging with the help desk.
The application enumeration issue was impacted by permissions, which were later updated accordingly. The resolution in this scenario proactively corrected the issue before it had an impact on users. The Goliath Virtual User detected the outage immediately, and an alert was generated containing details of the outage, including screenshots from each stage of the test to help determine root cause.
This allowed the appropriate personnel to review the screenshots for more information and provided a clearer understanding of the issue. Armed with these screenshots, details, and analytics, the Citrix administrator quickly determined that application enumeration and permission settings were the failure point, and the permissions were updated accordingly. The difference with this troubleshooting scenario was that the entire Citrix infrastructure and supporting components were being tested automatically by GAAM.
Alerts and screenshots were provided as a service to the Citrix administrators, and the issue was resolved before users were impacted. A national law firm running Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops across the globe encountered significant user complaints around slow logon times. These incidents increased user frustration, decreased efficiency, and frustrated the help desk team, who were taking calls from angry users.
Logon slowness can be difficult to troubleshoot on your own because there could be many reasons logon times are slow. First, you should try to establish patterns and run through a process of elimination:. One of the first tools to use is Director and the logon duration metrics that can be captured per user. Search for an affected user and see what areas of the logon is slow. Then, engage with other teams such as networking to have them perform network tests and establish if any latency is occurring between each of the global offices and each data center.
The server infrastructure team will review Hypervisor and virtual machine resource consumption and capacity across both VDAs and the supporting infrastructure servers. If you have identified a pattern, like only a certain set of desktops are affected, concentrate your troubleshooting efforts on those. Launch the desktop yourself and determine if you see the same logon slowness. The resolution in this scenario was much simpler and faster. Goliath Performance Monitor was running in the environment and producing advanced logon-duration reports.
The Goliath logon duration reports for each user session include metrics such as:. In this scenario, it was quickly detected that a specific GPO was causing 37 seconds of extra login time due to unnecessary registry data being set by the GPO.
A top 10 US health system with more than locations nationally encountered end users from multiple locations reporting significant performance impact when scanning to electronic health records.
This increased clinician stress and frustration and had an impact on patient care due to the inability to process records and documents through the EHR system.
First evaluate the Citrix server that the user is connected too, but if that is not the cause then non-Citrix interdependencies should be evaluated. For example, external storage could be experiencing an IOPS bottleneck. Also keep in mind that there could also be a problem in the application backend causing latencies For example, a human resources application database server is down or running slow.
Always analyze the Citrix environment first, but when you have disproved Citrix as the root cause consider other interdependencies. For example, investigate the services and scripts that run when the VM boots up, evaluate the operations that happen when group policy GPO is applied, check if there could be a DNS problem, or even a network issue.
There could also be a resource contention issue within the hypervisor that hosts your virtual machines, or the storage that it uses. For this one I would not start with the Citrix logon, but I would first determine if there are issues with other corporate resources on these machines. If other resources cannot be accessed there could be a problem with the networking equipment at that location, or internet provider problem that could be impacting connectivity.
Keep in in mind that these are places to start your troubleshooting process, but the real resolution may not be limited to what I have shared here today. When considering your Citrix environment alone, one may argue that they can manually troubleshoot their deployment related problems.
We have discussed some examples of interdependencies that can impact common troubleshooting scenarios within Citrix environments including the Citrix logon. There is a lot of value in having end-to-end visibility across your Citrix tiers and their interdependent tiers with a monitoring tool. Not only will you be able to resolve real issues more quickly, you can also engage other teams only when needed and with specific insights that can enable you to resolve problems quickly and keep your users happy.
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