Painfully Slow Screen Refresh - Random

Crazy_About_JDE

Crazy_About_JDE

Well Known Member
Hello, Citrix list! I originally posted this issue to the EnterpriseOne Technical forum but got no response. The problem still plagues us.

I have since learned that OneWorld is not the culprit, as I originally assumed, so there has to be something else happening on Citrix.

This does affect both thin client users and ICA client users randomly.

>>>

Hello, list! I've had many terminal server users over the course of two weeks report that their OneWorld screen appears to be locked up. When I shadow their session, I find that their session is refreshing the screen very very very slowly when switching among windows. This affects OneWorld windows and anything else they may have open, such as Excel or Outlook. I have observed this in person, not just by shadowing.

Logging the user out of her Windows session and logging back in does not fix it.

It appears to affect only one user at a time, though I had two on the same day (different servers) last week. I have recorded the server names as well, and it never happens on the same server.

Any ideas?

-Tim
 
I had a similar problem at the last place I worked. We got around it by lowering the color quality for the published app. Setting it down to 256 or 16 colors I cant recall which.

Never did resolve the actual issue.
 
There are a couple of reasons how this can happen. Below are some of my experiences as to why Citrix Slows down.

1. Check to see the CPU on your enterprise server. Your enterprise server is also our security server and if the enterprise server is hammered, then Citrix has to wait to get information back.

2. The cache on the Citrix server is screwed up or you have a memory leak that causes this problem. Make sure you reboot every night and only have 25 - 30 users per citrix servers.

3. If a user on a Citrix box runs a heavy interactive statement, it chews up the memory from this machine and other users can feel the affects from it.

Hope this helps.
 
Thank you, JAB. When you've observed this slowdown effect, did it affect all users one on server?
 
Hi,

Check memory utilisation (CTRL-ALT-DEL, Task Manager) on
the server.
If used memory > physical RAM then it will start swapping
out memory pages to disk and performance goes down the pipe.
 
We had a similar issue when we upgraded our switches to GBit. The Enterprise server (iSeries -v5r1) had a 100Mb card were as the servers were reset to autonegotiate up to 1GB.

Fix was to set the ports on the switch to Citrix/UBE/ISeries to 100 full_duplex AND configure the driver cards in the windows make to fixed 100 full_duplex too.

Possible idea, hope this helps,

/J
 
A couple of other things to try, especially if not all users on the same servers are impacted. Determine the application and form and delete the User Overrides. I have had users lock up (the slowwwwww refresh) due to this before. the other is delete the particular user profile on that citrix server (or all the cixtrix servers) and let them recreate. That has solved the problem before also. Good Luck!
 
Resolved: Painfully Slow Screen Refresh - Random

Hello, all. Our network admin finally found a solution to this ugly problem!

>>>

I started running queries on citrix forums for every process running on our servers. I found a Guest post from 2002 from someone who was describing the exact same problem.

Hardware Resource Logs OK
Server Event Logs OK
Citrix IMA DB OK
Network Latency OK
Client Hardware OK
MS/Citrix Hotfixes Applied
Problem (30-40 seconds to switch between windows) attaching itself to various applications, seemingly at random.

They had even rebuilt a few servers from scratch and that did not help.

What they found was the Microsoft process CTFMON was running as a background process and impacting other user processes. CTFMON monitors all application windows and handles alternative user input and language translation. It runs by default as soon as a user logs in, before they launch any user processes. So when iexplore.exe, outlook.exe, oexplore.exe, excel.exe, etc were freezing up, it was in reaction to the CTFMON process.

There is no official document from Microsoft or Citrix in regards to this, but so far, the testing on the solution has gone well; I just removed access to the ctfmon files on the server via NTFS so user sessions can not run the process. I have a test group of users and if they are all still 100% OK on Friday I am marking the issue as resolved.

<<<

And they were. Problem resolved.
 
Back
Top