[THIN] Re: Memory Usage
- From: "Rick Mack" <Rick.Mack@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <thin@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Fri, 28 Apr 2006 14:08:39 +1000
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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