Book Image

Citrix XenApp Performance Essentials

By : Luca Dentella
Book Image

Citrix XenApp Performance Essentials

By: Luca Dentella

Overview of this book

Citrix XenApp is an application virtualization product that allows users to connect to their corporate applications from any device. XenApp can host applications on central servers and allows users to interact with them remotely or stream and deliver them to user devices for local execution. Citrix XenApp Performance Essentials is a practical guide that provides you guidelines, best practices, and real world examples that will help you to improve the performance of your farm, identifying and solving possible bottlenecks and using advanced features including the new features provided by XenApp 6.5. Citrix XenApp is widely used to deliver enterprise applications to end users. This book covers the whole process of optimizing a XenApp farm, starting from the design phase all the way to tuning for remote users and connecting via geographic links. With your farm in production, you will understand what to monitor and how to optimize your farm, as well as how to use an open-source tool, WANem, to test the applications' behavior with different link conditions. You will also learn which settings and features XenApp offers to optimize CPU and memory utilization. This book will help you to prevent or solve performance problems and make your users happy working with published applications.
Table of Contents (12 chapters)

OS optimization


Citrix XenApp runs on Windows 2008 R2. It's possible to apply some changes to the OS configuration to increase the overall performances of the server.

A document including all the suggested modifications has been published by Citrix (http://support.citrix.com/article/CTX131577). In the next section I'm listing, in my opinion, the most important ones.

All the servers

The following modifications apply to all the session-host servers in your farm:

Paging system components

You can prevent system components to be paged to disk with the following registry key:

HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory ManagementDisablePagingExecutive = dword:00000001

Power saving

Select the maximum performance scheme in both your server BIOS and in Windows Power Plan.

Worker threads

You can increase the number of threads Windows uses for read-ahead and write-behind requests, improving I/O performance:

HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\ExecutiveAdditionalCriticalWorkerThreads...