Hi Bjarne,

I agree with Armeen. Maybe before considering adding additional hardware to your Citrix infrastructure, you might want to do some tracing and profiling of your applications. This might end up actually being a lot cheaper, effective and/or faster than extra hardware. You may find more information on how to do that here: https://www.appeon.com/system/files/product-manual/users_guide_for_pb_0.pdf.

As a former Citrix Administrator, I will provide you with some recommendations for your environment. But I still highly recommend you PowerServer for a definite solution to your performance issues. (Check this out: https://www.appeon.com/developers/library/videos/why-we-chose-appeon-web-over-citrix.html).

• Publish your application to groups instead of users. (Requires less validation)
• Streamed applications my require you to be more client specific. Hence more performance tuning can arise from it.
• Hosted applications might prove to be better in this scenario, because this doesn't necessarily require extra file-shares, file servers or data stores for your infrastructure. Reducing your network latency considerably as well as your Application Compatibility.
• Be careful with Antivirus tools that might be causing the performance issues. Monitor the activity while you execute the application by a client. Sometimes Antivirus can perform analysis over Citrix activity as well as Application side activity at the same time. This can be a performance killer.
•  Depending on your Citrix XenDesktop and/or XenApp version, monitor the IMA. It may be causing performance issues as well.
• Enable the "Start this application without waiting for printing to be created" option. (See here and here for additional info that might have something to do with what you mentioned.)
• Reduce the "Minimum color quality" for the application.
• Run the recommended database scripts for your farm.

I hope these recommendations proof useful.

Regards,

Hi, and thanks for great feedback.

The database is located on a separate server yes.

The big reason why our customer wants to move away from the hosted environment, is because the supplier of these services has tried everything to increase performance.

They have logged and measured everything, and I have been consulting a bit to see if we can help.

We even traveled to the location to look at the internal network.

They cannot seem to find the issue, and our customer has had enough now.

Just to give you an impression on how slow this is at times: to show a predefined dropdown datawindow without any code at all: 4-5 secs.

On my computer and most of our customers it’s almost impossible to measure it because it’s instant.

Bjarne

I assume SQL Anywhere is not installed on the Citrix server?  Citrix is just running the PB and other desktop apps like office?  If not, then you should definitely move SQL Anywhere off of the Citrix server rather than trying to throw gobs of hardware at Citrix, which is extremely inefficient.

Also, before throwing more hardware at Citrix I would recommend (assuming SQL Anywhere is on a separate machine) doing some performance benchmarking to see if the slowdown is happening on the client/Citrix tier or on the database/server tier or the network connection between the two?  If it is either the network connection or the database/server tier then adding more hardware to Citrix won't solve your problem.

Lastly, I should add that while Citrix is horribly inefficient and one of the key reasons many customers choose PowerServer Web over Citrix, I think Citrix should be able to handle 20-25 users fine from a performance point of view.  So that's why I'm suggesting to look at other things first before adding more hardware to Citrix.

I'm not an expert on Citrix, but our (pb 12.6) apps run on Citrix for several clients and they are not slow.

What is slow on Citrix connections is any window animations and such. They need to redraw every 0.00x milliseconds so that sends the whole screen everytime over the connection.

Then you say "

Our application (PB2017 R2) is located on a file server and are either started directly from the network share or via a loading app which downloads all files to the local computer. ..... Nothing runs on the local computer."

" How can it be also slow when they download all files to the local computer? So they donwnload it, but nothing runs locally?

Maybe I'm missing something, I really hope someone can help you out here.

By the way, what also works quit well is to have all files of the application somewhere on a network and everyone just clicking on a link to that executable. They do need the database clients installed locally on their pc's.

Our Citrix clients DO have office, outlook and word installed locally and those are being used by the citrix sessions.

"