[THIN] Re: TSCALE or Appsense

  • From: "Angela Smith" <angela_smith9@xxxxxxxxxxx>
  • To: thin@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Thu, 11 Jan 2007 00:03:03 +1100

Hi Rick

I shall leave Memory Optimization enabled for a few weeks to see if it improves.

Rick, you misunderstood me on the pagefile point. I was thinking of rebooting the servers nightly to refresh the server resources just in case the memory is not being freed up fully once the applications close. We don't have the clearpagefileonexit option enabled (I made that mistake once). We currently reboot our servers weekly. Was interested in seeing if its worth doing it nightly. On this point, do people also reboot their Web Interface servers or dedicated Zone data Collectors or simply the servers that farm the apps?

(1) Is your page file contiguous (start and maximum same size, check with
pagedfrag (sysinternals)

Pagefile is contigous. 4096 min and max. 1-2 servers run 2003 Enterprise and have more than 4Gb RAM. These servers have 6Gb pagefiles. I know Citrix won't really use more than 4Gb RAM. Is it best I reduce the pagefile to 4Gb?

(2) What have you done by way of minimal system tuning, optimise memory for
applications etc?
I've got a tuning policy template that will help you do this without any
hacking

The farm was initially setup by Citrix so they used some of their own ADMs. Theres alot of customisations but not sure if they are performance based. Were you interested in any particular settings?

(3) Do you defrag your system disks on a regular basis?
- running a scheduled batch job to "defrag c:" at 3 AM every day is dead
simple

No. We don't defrag our disks at all. Is this something that will make a noticable performance difference? I had a look at a few servers (ie ran defrag manually) and it said it doesn't need defragging so I'll assume this is OK for now but I may schedule this if its best practice. Do you defrag your servers daily/weekly/monthly?

(4) How big are your user's profiles?
- if they  get too big (over 6-8 MB) the extra system overhead from logins
and logouts will really hurt.

Profiles are between 1-2Mb. We redirect Application Data path, Desktop path, My Pictures path and My Documents path to users TS Home Drive to keep profiles small.

(5) have you tuned your back-end servers (file/print, domain controllers) to
increase the network i/o queue size [ie maxmpxct/maxworkitems]
- I've got a tuning policy template for this that you can have.

I haven't tuned the File/Print server or the DC. Would be interested in seeing your template..

(6) Is your network/switch port condifigauration set up properly. If you
take a large file, does it take the same time to copy to and to copy from
another system. Use %systemroot%\drive cache\i386\drivers.cab.
- that's an easy one for your network people if the speed isn't the same in
both directions.

According to networks team they are setup OK.  Copy speed is OK also

(7) My memory is a bit lazy at the moment. Did you mention that the main
apps are browser based? What are you running?

The majority of our published applications are browser based. Some do use Java.

I have installed a Smart Array Write cache on one server as a test to see if it makes a difference before I upgrade all my servers.

Hope this helps

Thanks



**********************************************************************

From: "Rick Mack" <ulrich.mack@xxxxxxxxx>
Reply-To: thin@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
To: thin@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [THIN] Re: TSCALE or Appsense
Date: Mon, 8 Jan 2007 20:17:53 +1000

Hi Angela,

Wait a while. Depending on the frequency of application usage, it can take
anything up to a few weeks to finish things up.

And I guess the hard news is that with some applications DLL rebasing works
brilliantly, and with others it hardly does anything at all.

We'll just have to wait and see. But in any event, flushing the pagefile
will make the reboots take heaps longer and aside from some largely
irrelevant security considerations, it won't do much else for you

Anyway, maybe we've been answering the wrong questions, and going about this
all the wrong way.

Excessive paging is certainly going to slow your system down, but a constant
companion to a high hard page fault rateis a lot of disk actvity with the
disk busy time starting to stay too close to 100%.

But there are other performance considerations as well, so I'd like to ask
you a few questions:

(1) Is your page file contiguous (start and maximum same size, check with
pagedfrag (sysinternals)
- provided you've got at least 4 GB of free contiguous disk space you can
fix this

(2) What have you done by way of minimal system tuning, optimise memory for
applications etc?
I've got a tuning policy template that will help you do this without any
hacking

(3) Do you defrag your system disks on a regular basis?
- running a scheduled batch job to "defrag c:" at 3 AM every day is dead
simple

(4) How big are your user's profiles?
- if they  get too big (over 6-8 MB) the extra system overhead from logins
and logouts will really hurt.

(5) have you tuned your back-end servers (file/print, domain controllers) to
increase the network i/o queue size [ie maxmpxct/maxworkitems]
- I've got a tuning policy template for this that you can have.

(6) Is your network/switch port condifigauration set up properly. If you
take a large file, does it take the same time to copy to and to copy from
another system. Use %systemroot%\drive cache\i386\drivers.cab.
- that's an easy one for your network people if the speed isn't the same in
both directions.

(7) My memory is a bit lazy at the moment. Did you mention that the main
apps are browser based? What are you running?

That's a start and once that's all covered we might have some positive
results from memory optimization.

regards,

Rick

Ulrich Mack
Commander Australia

On 1/8/07, Angela Smith <angela_smith9@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Hi Bernd / Rick

I have enabled memory optimization and it made next to no difference (we
do
run MPS 4 Enterprise).  Based on this, I may look at trailing Appsense to
see if this product makes a difference as the builtin tools obviously
don't
work too well in tuning IE.

As a side note, do you think rebooting the servers nightly would assist as
it would flush the swapfile?  We currently reboot our servers weekly.  We
have quite a few users complaining about performance so Im keen to try
anything.

Thanks for your great responses
Angela



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