ArcGIS with Citrix- Performance and Known Issues

SarahBurnham · ‎06-15-2010

Hi

We are currently looking to deploy ArcGIS on Citrix across our Authority. Does anybody have any experience of running ArcGIS on Citrix as opposed to Desktop clients? We are especially interested in known issues/ performance and optimum settings for improving speed, which initial testing has shown to be very slow. We will be running on a minimum version of 9.3, but possibly 10.

Any help or advise would be much appreciated!

Thanks

RenatoSalvaleon · ‎10-12-2010

Mark/Scott,

This is not a citrix issue and should be posted in the ArcGIS Server forum.

For your convenience I'll reply here.

This was a major pain for me as well until I found an ESRI ArcGIS Server 9.3 documentation. I am working on a 931 platform but I'll continue testing this in 10 soon.

These two pages help me understand the problem better:
http://webhelp.esri.com/arcgisserver/9.3.1/dotNet/index.htm
http://webhelp.esri.com/arcgisserver/9.3.1/dotNet/index.htm

The answer depends a lot on where you store your imagery. We store our imagery on dedicated NAS file servers, we (domain users granted permissions in the networks shares) can definetely connect and add these data in our MXDs. However, a user local to ArcGIS server host machine (ARCGISSOC) is not a domain user. I think I read it somewhere in server documentation that it's not good practice to use a domain user as well for your web services - I'm digressing.

Back to the issue. When I publish maps from ArcMap either as MSD or just straight to the Server, the user that actually consumes these images from the web services is ARCGISSOC user (I'm not an expert but someone can confirm or debate this). ArcGISSOC local user does not have permissions on the folder shares where your images are unless you create this user with read permissions on that file server(folder) with exactly the same name as the local\ARCGISSOC user created by post installation on the ArcGIS server machine.

In our case there's no pretty solution because our IT manages these folder shares (file server where you can manage users or groups) and adding a local user is an exception.

My solution for this particular problem is
- create similar project folder structures on my desktop and the arcgis server host machine. (normally servers have a second hard drive for data - physical E drive in our case - avoid using the C drive)
- copy the images from the network share to the desktop and arcgis server host project folder
- create a local user ARCGISSOC on my desktop
- publish the MXD without any problems

This workaround is good for us because the web apps will be online for less than 3 months while the project is in progress. We really just dump the duplicate images, services and the web app afterwards.

In my opinion the best solution is to manage our own file server, create a local user id on this network share file server, then I don't have to be doing this data duplication. Another option I want to pursue is Image server for ArcGIS10. We've tried 9.2 in the past and we did not succeed.

Hope this helps.

Renato Salvaleon
Georgia Power Land Department

Mark,

We are having the exact same issue where we get the "unable to open...", but is we are admin or logged into the desktop the image (tif) opens successfully.

Did you ever find what caused this problem?

Thanks,

Scott Barker
Alabama Gas

GregoryPonto · ‎10-27-2010

If anyone is experiencing visual artifacts with ArcGIS 10.x (or prior release) on Citrix, reducing Application Color Depth to 16-bit color seems to address a number of these issues.
(Citrix Access Management Console > Farm > Application > ArcMap > Properties > Advanced > Appearance > Colors > Set to 16-bit)

Most notably, recently we found that Citrix clients running ArcGIS 10.0 / XenApp 4.x / Windows 2003 Server are unable to render the "ArcGIS Online" browser from within ArcMap. Reducing ArcMap color depth to 16-bit addresses this issue.

* The issue does not surface with ArcGIS Desktop 10.0 / XenApp 5.x / Windows 2008 Server.

I'll continue to post these "tips" as we run across them.

jduval · ‎10-27-2010

ESRI Support asked to me to test that as well. When a user used RDP to remote in, the peformance was 'normal'.

When I run Task Manager, I only see my own apps running. We only have 10 users (clients) on a 16 CPU and 12GB Ram server (new since June 2010). The CPU usage rarely goes beyond 10%, memory usage is usually around 5GB. Performance was also extremely slow when only 1 user (administrator) was logged on. I don't think we are overwhelming our Citrix server...

Thanks for your feedback! Any other suggestions to try?

Julie

I forgot to post that the performance issue I was experiencing on my setup of ArcGIS 10 running on XenApp 6.0 and Windows Server 2008 Std R2 was resolved.

When logging into Citrix, I goto the Preferences tab and then Session Settings. There is a section for 'Local resources: Use my Documents and Desktop folder' This needs to be UNCHECKED.

What was happening is that ArcMap would open and look for the default geodb on my local C: across the internet and back - which slowed ArcMap performance tremendously. This also occured when I opened any tool from ArcToolBox as it automatically points to the same default geodb (regardless if I pointed my project's default somewhere else).

Also, to note, any ArcMap 10 that I had opened/created before this issue was resolved, still pointed to my local C:. I would then have to repoint it to a citrix drive, save, and all would be well.

I hope this info saves a lot of headaches for other users out there!

Julie
Alberta, Canada

GISP

GregoryPonto · ‎12-29-2010

Since the release we've seen a number of inquiries regarding Citrix and ArcGIS Desktop 10. The most common issue we're seeing is that of remote client performance. In most instances, this type of performance problem is resolved with the following Teminal Services configuration change:

Terminal Services Configuration > ICA-tcp Properties > Client Settings
> Color Depth = Limit to 16-bits
> Redirection > Disable > Drive, Windows Printer, LPT Port, Audio, Default to main client printer
(See attached screenshot)

[ATTACH]4064[/ATTACH]

This configuration will prevent Citrix from accessing local data on client systems thereby eliminating the problem of large data sets streaming from client to Citrix back to client.

LisaDygert · ‎01-21-2011

Hello,

We have been running ArcGIS 9.1 through Citrix for a number of years now and it has worked well and met our needs. We are now trying to upgrade to 9.3.1 and have encountered several problems every time we try testing the environment in 9.3.1. We are using ArcGIS 9.3.1 with SDE 9.3.1 in an enterprise environment. The problems we are encountering typically involve users not being able to get into ArcGIS, opening templates, loading data, etc. after we get approximately 12-15 people online at the same time. It works fine prior to that, but as soon as that many people get on, it bogs down the system and no longer allows people to get into ArcGIS. We have 35 licenses for ArcGIS and many more for Citrix, so we want to be able to allow as many people on as licenses we have available (35), but at this point with 9.3.1 that doesn't seem likely. Is there anything we can do to eliminate the connection problems?

Any assistance at all would be greatly appreciated. 😉

Thanks,
Lisa Dygert

AaronHixson · ‎01-21-2011

Do the users notice a big difference when reducing it from 32-bit to 16-bit?

JeffDeWeese · ‎01-22-2011

Lisa,

Do you have at least SP1 for 9.3.1 installed? If not, you will need a special patch (not on the support site) that fixes memory issues for multi-user ArcGIS Desktop environments. This sounds like it may be what you are experiencing based on the description.

Jeff DeWeese
Esri

AaronHixson · ‎03-31-2011

Has ESRI posted any articles on how to properly optimize settings for best performance? I know there have been some posts here, but some documentation from ESRI would be wonderful.

We currently have a XenApp 6.0 Citrix Farm. We have 5 presentation servers. 4 are HP Proliant DL360 G6 servers with 12GB of Ram and two processors giving us 16 processing threads. We plan to upgrade to 24 GB of Ram very soon. All four servers run ArcMap 9.3.1 with SP2

my email is aaron@hixsonfamily.net- fyi

We also have a Virtual Machien presentation server hosting ArcMap 10 so that our end users can get their feet wet with the new version of ArcMap. We plan to upgrade the entire envionrment to ArcMap 10 sometime this summer.

GaryWalter1 · ‎04-11-2011

A Best Practices doc would be invaluable. We are using ArcGIS 9.3.1 on XenApp6. Our users make use of My Network Places for UNC pathing, but on the XenApp6 build ArcCatalog doesn't see the My Network Places mappings.

JohnGravois · ‎04-27-2011

Hi All,
We just diagnosed an issue in ArcGIS 10.0 in which labels appear blurry when raster imagery is also present in the map. It seems that the lossy compression policy in place in the Citrix Delivery Service Console (XenApp 6) was causing the issue.

Blurriness is apparent in ArcGIS when the default "medium" setting is applied across the Citrix server. It improves somewhat when setting compression to "low", and is corrected completely when set to "none". Of course, additional compression preserves bandwidth, so network traffic should also be taken into consideration when applying settings.