Re: Thin Clients vs Win XP / PE

Hi Marcus,

Let me start out by saying that the symptoms you describe have almost always been caused by network issues in my experience. The above is based on a server that is not overloaded or having problems due to hardware or driver issues. Of course your situation could be one of the unusual cases.

You have mentioned that your switch logs are clean--that is a plus. How about more low-tech troubleshooting like continuous pings? Pick a few of the most troublesome workstations and run a continuous ping to the TS. When the users notice a delay, have them look at the pings. They should see an endless stream of replies with time<1ms (or whatever is normal for your LAN), even when the delay is 45 seconds like you mentioned. Teach them how to use Ctrl-Break every so often to view statistics and verify that no packets were lost.

When the users experience a delay have them press Ctrl-Alt-End. Does the Windows Security dialog come up immediately or is there a long delay?

One key thing I noticed is that based on the information you have provided your problem seems to be more user and/or workstation specific. I say this based upon your description that all users experience some lag occasionally but for one it is particularly painful. What is different about this one user? Do they run different software, have different printers, etc.? About how much lag do all users experience? How often is occasionally?

When you run perfmon on the TS what do the numbers look like when a problem occurs? For example, CPU utilization, Commit charge total, Pages/sec, Avg Disk Queue Length? Are you seeing missing data points?

What Write Policy do you have set on your Virtual Disk? If you have a PERC card with battery backup then I would recommend setting it to Write-Back. Check in Server Administrator (newer server) or Array Manager Console (older server). What settings do you have on the Policies tab of the Properties of your PERC card? Have you contacted Dell Server Support and asked them to verify that you have configured the controller and array for the best performance, and that you have the latest firmware and drivers?

There are certain cases where delays or pauses may occur. For example, tranferring a large file (or clipboard data) from the client to the TS, situations where the shell is waiting for an operation to complete, problems with printer autocreation or printer drivers, etc.

What are you running for the server OS? 2003 x64 Standard R2 SP2?

What software is loaded on your TS servers? Which programs do the users typically have problems with? All programs?

Thanks.

-TP

Marcus Cotey wrote:
Well lets, for the moment, forget about my one user...and lets
discuss this from a general perspective. Say the KB article is not
the issue...but we are experiencing on all our clients a keyboard lag
(buffering) to some degree or another. What would cause that? Forgot about all the other symptoms and just think of this from the
user perspective that the keyboard input seems slow, say once or
twice an hour and sometimes the slowness is short in duration (couple
of secs) to almost a full minute.

What would your thoughts on that be? The Term Servers themselves are
pretty darn beefy (the slowest one has a quad processor with 8GBs of
RAM) so I can't imagine it is a hardware issue. Switch logs are
clean so it doesn't look like a network issue.
.

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