Are you monitoring the standard TS/RDS/Ctx perfmon counters?
Webster From: Sean Martin [mailto:seanmarti...@gmail.com] Subject: Re: Tweaking Performance - Citrix Servers Thanks for the response. Yeah, we've noticed a big difference between our older servers without caching and newer ones with it. Unfortunately we can't dedicate the time to our hardware refresh project that would eliminate those older servers. We're in the process of redistributing the newer hardware to the application silo running the Office suite, since that's where most of our performance complaints stem from. Even with caching enabled, we still receive complaints of application hangs when users are connected to one of the newer servers. We've spent the last several months investigating the issue and trying to resolve it for good. We've made progress, we just haven't eliminated the occurrences. If you're referring to the lack of fault tolerance with a RAID0 setup, then we understand the cons very well. We have enough servers in our farm that we can lose a handful of servers due to disk failure and still support production (albeit performance may suffer a little more). We have a fairly decent stock of spare parts as well. - Sean On Wed, Aug 4, 2010 at 10:40 AM, Webster <carlwebs...@gmail.com> wrote: I have seen issues with the blade RAID Controllers NOT having a battery backup cache controller. That will seriously impact performance. I don't think RAID0 will negatively affect the page file. Just remember the caveats of using RAID0. Before you go making changes, create a baseline to measure against. Webster Citrix Technology Professional From: Sean Martin [mailto:seanmarti...@gmail.com] Subject: Tweaking Performance - Citrix Servers We use Blade servers in our Presentation Server 4.5 environment (approximatley 100 server split between 8 application silos). The hardware ranges from Dell PowerEdge 1955s to newer Dell M610s. We've been toying with ways to increase performance of the servers and recognize that disk performance on our Blades is usually the bottleneck. In our standard configuration, the two drives (1955s = 73GB/10k, M610s = 146GB/15K) are mirrored. We've configured a couple of servers with no RAID (two independant disks) and tried balancing resources across the two (page file, temp directories, spooler directory, etc). While this did yield some positive results, it wasn't that noticeable in the grand scheme of things. I just read the following article from Citrix, apparently published on 7/21/2010. The issues referred to are currently what plague our environment the most. One of the recommendations is to try a RAID 0 configuration in Blade systems with only two drives. We've historically written this off as a solution because of the recommendation of not striping a page file. Do you think the potential fragmentation issues would be considered an acceptable risk when compared to the potential disk performance improvements? We do have Diskkeeper installed on all of our servers which is scheduled to run during the evening hours. I do believe it addresses page file fragmentation but it has been awhile since I've looked into the capabilities of the product. I should note that our M610s with 256MB cache (caching enabled) and RAID1 do seem to perform much better than our older servers. <http://support.citrix.com/article/CTX125882> http://support.citrix.com/article/CTX125882 ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~
