Terminal server performance over high latency links
- by holz
Our datacenter and head office is currently in Brisbane, Australia, and we have a branch office in the UK. We have a private WAN with a 768k link to our UK office and the latency is at about 350ms.
The terminal server performance is reeeeealy bad.
Applications that don't have too much animation or any images seem to be okay. But as soon as they do, the session is almost unusable. Powerpoint and internet explorer are good examples of apps that make it run slow. And if there is an image in your email signature, outlook will hang for about 10 seconds each time a new line is inserted, while the image gets moved down a few pixels.
We are currently running server 2003. I have tried Server 2008 R2 RDS, and also a third party solution called Blaze by a company called Ericom, but it is still not too much better.
We currently have a 5 levels dynamic class of service with the priority in the following order.
VoIP
Video
Terminal Services
Printing
Everything else
When testing the terminal server performance, the link monitored using net-flows, and have plenty we of bandwidth available, so I believe that it is a latency issue rather than bandwidth.
Is there anything that can be done to improve performance. Would citrix help at all?
