Performance/Sizing

Web video is ubiquitous. We take it for granted that browsers play video in high resolution, over any connection, on any device. Behind the scenes, a complex machinery of video formats, codecs, and GPU acceleration techniques is at work to make it all happen. This post explains what is what.

How do popular browsers differ in compute footprint when running animations? In this article I am comparing the CPU as well as the GPU utilization of Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, Microsoft Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox. To make things more interesting I tested GPU performance on Nvdia and Intel.

This article is based on my Citrix Synergy 2015 session and is the fourth in a mini-series on Group Policy performance. All measurements by uberAgent on Windows Server 2012 R2 with Citrix XenApp 7.6 in a steady state. Please start reading with the first article.

When sizing a new environment it is tempting to use averages. It seems the logical thing to do. But it also guarantees a bad user experience. Example: Sizing an RDS or XenApp Farm Let’s say you’re tasked with building a new Citrix XenApp farm. Being a diligent IT person you set up a pilot: one or two machines with all the right software and settings. Then you carefully select a group of pilot users in such a way that they represent the organization’s employee types statistically correctly. Then you let them work on the new platform, ironing out bugs and such. At the end of that period, you have a great new platform. But there is one big question left: how many servers to buy?!

This article is based on my Citrix Synergy 2015 session and is the third in a mini-series on Group Policy performance. All measurements by uberAgent on Windows Server 2012 R2 with Citrix XenApp 7.6 in a steady state. Please start reading with the first article.

This article is based on my Citrix Synergy 2015 session and is the second in a mini-series on Group Policy performance. All measurements by uberAgent on Windows Server 2012 R2 with Citrix XenApp 7.6 in a steady state. Please start reading with the first article.

This article is based on my Citrix Synergy 2015 session and is the first in a mini-series on Group Policy performance. All measurements by uberAgent on Windows Server 2012 R2 with Citrix XenApp 7.6 in a steady state.

PowerShell is a popular and extremely versatile tool, but is it a good idea to use PowerShell in logon scripts? Let’s try to find out! Setting the Stage I am going to compare the resource utilization of the following languages frequently used with logon scripts:

FileIOTest is a command line tool that tests the speed of local or remote (SMB) storage by performing some common file IO operations repeatedly and measuring the duration. These are the main facts:

GPU acceleration is en vogue. After slowly but steadily moving out of the 3D niche it has arrived in the mainstream. Today, applications like Microsoft Office leverage the GPU, but even more so do web browsers. Chrome, Firefox, and Internet Explorer all have hardware acceleration turned on by default. People generally seem to be happy about that - GPUs are super-efficient, the more work they do the fewer remains for the CPU, overall energy consumption is reduced and battery life increases. Or so the myth goes. Interestingly, facts to prove that are hard to find. Nobody seems to have measured how GPU acceleration affects CPU usage. Let’s change that.

This is what I have been doing for the past few days: draining the battery of my new Dell Venue Pro 11, a Windows 8.1 tablet (the real deal, not RT). I wanted to find out how good Windows has become at battery-efficient video playback and how that is affected by GPU acceleration.

Do you know the maximum number of users each of your terminal servers can host with acceptable performance? You may have found out the hard way how many are too many - but how many are just right? Farm sizing and server capacity planning are typical tasks for consultants who often have a hard time fighting the peculiarities of perfmon and logman trying to get the data they need for their calculations. It can be so much easier at no additional cost. The 60-day Enterprise Trial version of Splunk in conjunction with an evaluation license of uberAgent give all the information you need in much less time. Here is how.

When you move users from a physical PC to a VDI environment you may find that they are not too happy with their new machine’s performance - it happened to me. To quantify things I took a series of measurements comparing the old PCs we migrated away from with both VDI machines and the new PCs available to some.

Let use take a look at some graphs I created with Windows Performance Analyzer (WPA), showing a typical corporate laptop boot Windows 7. Detailed information on creating such a trace can be found in my earlier article Analyzing a Slow Boot with Windows Performance Recorder & Analyzer.

In the last five years Xperf has gained popularity as an administrator’s secret weapon for battling all kinds of performance issues. But just when it was on the brink of becoming as mainstream as such a tool can be, Microsoft superseded it by something else: Windows Performance Recorder.

Today it is still as common as it was in the 90s to go for a coffee after switching on the PC in the morning, only to find it still booting when coming back several minutes later. SSDs have not arrived in the average office yet, and even they can only cure some of the diseases that cause computers to start up agonizingly slowly.

When you buy a new HP server it comes with the BIOS setting HP Power Profile set to Balanced Power and Performance. That sounds good but is bad - at least for CPU performance in a VDI environment.

The days are long gone when a browser was just another application. Modern websites are applications of their own, and the browser is their operating system. That has consequences for monitoring. It is no longer sufficient to gather performance data for the browser as a whole. When, for example, Internet Explorer’s CPU usage is high, Administrators need to understand what caused that. Is it the business-critical ERP site or are people just watching fun videos on YouTube?

Considering the importance of fast logons for a good user experience there is surprisingly little information on the subject. Windows does not even record the total logon time, let alone where it is spent. Administrators wishing to analyze their users’ logons are left in the dark. But that can be changed.

If you have ever used Sysinternals’ Process Monitor, chances are high you were a little intimidated when you looked at your first capture: it probably contained hundreds of thousands of registry and file system events, generated in a minute or less. That amount of activity must surely indicate high system load - but strangely, very often it does not. Looking at the hard disk LED you will only see an occasional flickering, even though thousands of file system events are captured per second. How is that possible? Read on to find out.

Getting Login VSI to launch sessions on multiple RD session hosts is possible with the connection type Custom command line with CSV, but it is more difficult than it should be - especially if you want to launch the RDP sessions in windowed rather than full screen mode.

A little known fact about the Windows Offline Files functionality is it slows down network operations considerably. Here is how and why. Test Results The following tests were performed with a set of 1,114 files of a total size of 408 MB. In the copy test the files were copied from a Windows 7 client machine to a file server over a 100 MBit LAN connection. In the delete test the files were deleted on the file server. No antivirus or other security products were running on either side. Each test was run twice, the table lists the average.

This article is part of a mini-series. You can find the other articles here. In the previous articles in this series we saw how to calculate a farm’s capacity and then how to determine its load. With that information and knowledge of our methodology we can go about calculating the capacity of the new farm, in other words doing the actual sizing. Which is dead simple, by the way.

This article is part of a mini-series. You can find the other articles here. In the previous part of this series we saw how to determine the capacity of a server farm. This time we will look at how that capacity is utilized, in other words at farm load. As before we will do that for the four main components of a XenApp server separately: CPU, memory, storage and network.