Citrix and slowness

Question

Hi,

A customer is using JMP within a Cistrix environment (with about 200 JMP users) and the IT group has a lot of slowness feedbacks from users. 
Why? 
What can the IT team do to avoid this? How can we speed up?

Does anyone have some experiences about Citrix environment and best practices?
Thank a lot,

Florence

stan_koprowski · Answer

Hi @flo_kussener,

Slowness is a bit too vague of a description in the context of Citrix.

Can you elaborate in more detail the 'slowness' to help diagnose the problem before we offer up solutions?

* Do they experience this with the logon?
* Do they have sluggish responsiveness when moving the mouse?
* Do they have sluggish response when typing?
* Is the sluggishness when performing a calculation in one of the JMP platforms?
* Is the sluggishness when bringing data into JMP?

I think we need some more details here to help.

I would be happy to join a call with their IT group to help isolate the problem(s).

cheers,

Stan

MikeD_Anderson · Answer

I agree with @martindemel.

At Globalfoundries, we had Citrix thin clients (little boxes with a monitor, keyboard and mouse that just connected to a Citrix server) in the clean room so we didn't need laptops while we were in there.  They didn't run JMP, but anything they did run - Excel, Outlook, Wordpad, etc. was slow and laggy.  It was always a combination of load on the server and configuration of the Citrix VM's (memory and cpu's).

For instance, I had to do an emergency rework of something in development and was in the clean room at 2AM.  Hardly anyone was in there - and Citrix was running with almost no lag at all.  Later that day, when the clean room was fully staffed with the day shift, everything was super laggy.

Also, the JMP kernel is fairly light weight (37MB while running on my Mac) but if they have a bunch of background processes or other apps going things will slow down dramatically.

Best,

M

martindemel · Answer

Hi Florence,

there are some questions to raise first before beeing able to answer this:

1. How much RAM every user has available and how much is already used in general mode not using JMP. Often in a Citrix they allocate 2GB per user, sometimes 4GB. Depending on the data amount this might result in a slow down.

2. Is the slow down during analysis or during data access?

2. How much traffic is on the network in general? Are other high-resource-demanding programs/tasks run on the same network/server?  Does the complain always happen at the same time/day of week/... (we have a slowdown in network e.g. in the afternoon when US is joining)

3. Do people complaining use JMP from remote or from within the network, and if from within in the same country as the server is?

4. Did IT test already if they can reproduce the behaviour? Did they have checked there was nothing else running with high throughput at the same time?

5. How much data does the user complaining usually try to access and work with?

There are more questions like these one can ask to get down to the root cause. However, without these information you will likely fail to get the root cause. Hope this helps.