[THIN] Re: Memory Usage
- From: "Rick Mack" <Rick.Mack@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <thin@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Fri, 28 Apr 2006 16:37:15 +1000
Hi Geoff,
Office XP will show some savings, office 2003 is generally fairly well
optimised already.
There's really no magic about DLL remapping. A utility as simple as listdlls
from www.sysinternals.com will show you what DLLs have been remapped
(candidates for DLL remapping/rebasing/memory optimization). I have to stress
that the DLL remapping is variable depending on what else is loaded into memory
by you and other users but it'll give you a rough idea. Listdlls run as an
admin will give a listing of all dlls used by an application and if you look
for the "relocated" messages that'll give you an idea of how many DLLs "could"
be remapped to save memory.
Have a look at the Appsense performance suite. One of the nice features is the
ability to minimise an application's working set size when minimised or
disconnected. This can really make a difference.
regards,
Rick
Ulrich Mack
Volante Systems
________________________________
From: thin-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx on behalf of Geoff Cridland
Sent: Fri 28/04/2006 14:33
To: thin@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [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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