[THIN] Re: Memory Usage

Rick,
 
Thanks for the feedback.  
 
We stuck with Office XP for the upgrade.  Do you happen to know if it
has any memory savings with DLL remapping turned on?  I have turned on
the memory optimization however the memory usage for each user seems to
vary so much that it is hard to say what improvements I'm actually
getting.  I've seen Office applications taking up to 50MB while they are
open (without even having focus), but drop down to 1-2MB when minimised.
If there was some program that would run in the background and minimise
all applications which weren't being used we could get heaps more users
on each of our servers!!  However that problem is seen in the old farm
as well as the new one.
 
Thanks,
 
Geoff.

        -----Original Message-----
        From: thin-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:thin
-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Rick Mack
        Sent: Friday, 28 April 2006 14:09
        To: thin@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
        Subject: RE: [THIN] Memory Usage
        
        
        Hi Geoff,
         
        The scalability comments have to be put into perspective.
         
        On Microsoft's side, Windows Server 2003 upped many of the
memory limitations that were inherent in Windows 2000 such as the
maximum registry size. The base operating system image is also fairly
lean and stuff like garbage collection has improved markedly compared to
2000. If your users numbers were limited on WIndows 2000 because of
kernel memory constraints, 2003 is going to be heaps more scalable.
         
        From a straight application platform viewpoint, Server 2003 is
generally more scalable that 2000 server, things like a bloated
exporer.exe aside. However what has to be added into the mix is that
most people upgrade all their application versions when they upgrade the
o.s. If for example you've upgraded to Office 2003 etc things are bigger
and uglier, period.
         
        There's also the small matter that many of the scalability
benchmarks are totally inappropriate or inapplicable to real life, but I
guess that's all marketting :-(
         
        On the Citrix front, PS4 has a larger system footprint than
Metaframe XP. However if you've got PS4 enterprise you've also got DLL
remapping (memory optimization) which, depending on the application mix,
can significantly reduce the total memory used by applications. However
this is application dependent, some apps give you a huge saving, some
none at all, and some will break with DLL remapping turned on.
         
        You mileage will vary and if you've upgraded your application
software as well, it's likely that if your systems were memory limited
you'll be supporting less users because of a larger total per-user
memory footprint.
         
        It's a bit like the x64 story. If the only bottleneck you've got
is kernel memory limitations with lots of everything else then x64 will
scale much further than 32 bit Windows. But if physical memory as
opposed to memory addressing capability is your problem, then the larger
memory footprint of x64 applications will ensure you get less rather
than more users on a box.
         
        regards,
         
        Rick
         
        
        Ulrich Mack 
        Volante Systems 
        

________________________________

        From: thin-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx on behalf of Geoff Cridland
        Sent: Fri 28/04/2006 13:22
        To: thin@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
        Subject: [THIN] Memory Usage
        
        

        Hi All, 

        Sorry about the last post, I must have hit the wrong button!! 

        We have been running a small Citrix farm with Windows 2000 SP3
and Metaframe XP FR3.  Finally we are making the conversion to Windows
2003 SP1 and Presentation Server 4.0.  After hearing all of the hype
from both Microsoft and Citrix about their relevant upgrades being able
to increase the number of users we should be able to now get on each
server I was looking forward to the change.

        However, to say I am disappointed with the memory usage results
of the upgrade is an understatement.  I now find that I am not even
getting as many users on each server let alone an increase of 25% or
more as stated by some sources.  We are running the same applications
(including versions) on the new setup as we were previously.  I have
turned on memory optimization which may have made a little improvement
to the applications, but the problem seems to be related to the new
operating system and the new version of Citrix themselves not the
applications.

        On an old server I would get 40 users while consuming only 2.5
GB RAM, but on the new servers I get only 30 users and I'm already
consuming more than 3 GB RAM.  It appears that the main consumers of the
extra RAM are operating system/Citrix processes rather than the
applications.  For example, on the old server explorer.exe consumes
around 5MB and on the new version around 15MB.  crss.exe was 2MB and is
now 5MB, winlogon.exe was 3MB and is now 6MB, wfshell was 3MB and is now
5.5MB.

        By the time you multiply the extra memory usage by the number of
users it is easy to see why we don't get the same amount of users
logging onto each server before running out of RAM.  We mostly publish a
full desktop (hence the reason why explorer.exe is using the extra RAM)
with only a few PC users using published applications.  

        Has anyone had similar experiences with this type of upgrade?
Is there some tuning options etc. I can look at or is there something
really obvious which I've missed?

        Thanks in advance, 

        Geoff. 


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