Recently logons to my PS4 desktop servers are taking longer. These are Windows 2K3 virtual machines running on ESX 3.5 boxes. There are about 20 Citrix servers total. The process used to take just a few seconds. The logon process now slows down for 10-30 seconds at the "loading your personal settings" logon process. The rest of the logon process seems ok.
We use roaming profiles and folder redirection for My Documents folders. I have checked roaming profile sizes which appear to be fine.
The Citrix auto-creation client printer policy set to enabled and set to auto-create local (non-network) printers only. The legacy client printer policy is also set to enabled and is set to create dynamic session private client printers. These policies are applied to all users.
I have logged in to all Citrix servers and the issue appears to be consistent on all of them. I have also logged in as multiple users and the issue is the same for all of them.
I have not changed any GPOs recently or changed any policies which would affect logons.
What else can I check? THANKS:)
Do you have a lot of groups, or maybe a few groups that have lots of groups nested in them? That can cause slower log on times as well.
Very good point. Most of us take this for granted and usually don't worry about it but nested groups can seriously affect logon speed. Avoid nested groups whenever possible when you have a very large AD infrastructure with thousands of objects. I have seen serious performance issues affecting logon speed in environments of 30,000+ objects. I'd start to watch this closely at 20,000+ objects. Also, make sure that you run the hive cleanup service on all your Citrix and Remote Desktop servers.
It sounds like you're still at the stage of trying to find what is causing it to hang before looking for the fix. The most likely areas are: profile, folder redirection, citrix policies, clent mappings (eg printer, client drives etc. Not likely to be the cause though), and group policy. I would start by setting up a user which does not have any of these components then add them, one by one, in isolation (ie only have one of these components "activated").
Once the component causing the problem is discovered, you can focus your attention on that.
Sorry, not a silver bullet to your problem but hopefully a methodical approach to resolving the issue is what's required.
HI,
I had the same problem on servers running PS 4.5, Windows 2003 SP2 and IE6. Below helped me. Actually doing the registry keys alone fixed the issue.
Try this: Ultimately I had success by using two articles. Two registry hacks helped. Thought you might need this info as well. Logon time down to 4 seconds. First Article: Reduced from 60 seconds to 20 seconds. Patch from MS recommended as well but it didn’t make a difference for me. Just needed the regkey. http://support.microsoft.com/kb/941158 Regkey ************************ Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00 HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\MAIN\FeatureControl\FEATURE_PARSING_BRANDING_CMDLINE_FLAGS_KB941158 "*"=dword:00000001 ************************ Second Article Article CTX104893. http://support.citrix.com/article/CTX104893 This is the article that removes the loading personal settings display... Regkey ************************ Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00 HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Citrix\Logon "DisableStatus"=dword:00000001 ************************
Best wishes
JLH
Joe Robinson: Do you have a lot of groups, or maybe a few groups that have lots of groups nested in them? That can cause slower log on times as well.
We do not use a lot of nested groups. Thanks for the reply though.
Leonardo Curbelo Jr: Very good point. Most of us take this for granted and usually don't worry about it but nested groups can seriously affect logon speed. Avoid nested groups whenever possible when you have a very large AD infrastructure with thousands of objects. I have seen serious performance issues affecting logon speed in environments of 30,000+ objects. I'd start to watch this closely at 20,000+ objects. Also, make sure that you run the hive cleanup service on all your Citrix and Remote Desktop servers.
We do not use very many nested groups. In fact there are very few.
How do I determine the number of objects?
The hive cleanup service is running on all Citrix and RDP servers. Thanks.
Jody Howard: HI, I had the same problem on servers running PS 4.5, Windows 2003 SP2 and IE6. Below helped me. Actually doing the registry keys alone fixed the issue. Try this:Ultimately I had success by using two articles. Two registry hacks helped. Thought you might need this info as well. Logon time down to 4 seconds.First Article:Reduced from 60 seconds to 20 seconds. Patch from MS recommended as well but it didn’t make a difference for me. Just needed the regkey.http://support.microsoft.com/kb/941158Regkey************************Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\MAIN\FeatureControl\FEATURE_PARSING_BRANDING_CMDLINE_FLAGS_KB941158"*"=dword:00000001************************Second ArticleArticle CTX104893. http://support.citrix.com/article/CTX104893 This is the article that removes the loading personal settings display...Regkey************************Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Citrix\Logon"DisableStatus"=dword:00000001************************ Best wishes JLH
Try this:Ultimately I had success by using two articles. Two registry hacks helped. Thought you might need this info as well. Logon time down to 4 seconds.First Article:Reduced from 60 seconds to 20 seconds. Patch from MS recommended as well but it didn’t make a difference for me. Just needed the regkey.http://support.microsoft.com/kb/941158Regkey************************Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\MAIN\FeatureControl\FEATURE_PARSING_BRANDING_CMDLINE_FLAGS_KB941158"*"=dword:00000001************************Second ArticleArticle CTX104893. http://support.citrix.com/article/CTX104893 This is the article that removes the loading personal settings display...Regkey************************Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Citrix\Logon"DisableStatus"=dword:00000001************************
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/941158 appears to apply to IE 7. Does that make a difference if I'm using IE 6.0?
http://support.citrix.com/article/CTX104893 appears to turn off the logon status messages that the user sees. Does this actually speed up the logon process or does it just hide the status messages? Thanks.
I just noticed that UPH Clean is not working correctly. There are 20 profiles listed under local profiles for my domain login id. There are several other users who also have multiple logins on these Citrix servers.
I uninstalled and reinstalled UPH Clean. It shows as running in services. I also rebooted the server. THere are still multiple local profiles for many users.
Any ideas why UPH Clean is not doing anything? I tried disabling AV and rebooting. Issue remains. THANKS:)
BTW I am using UPH Clean 1.6 - THANKS
If the problem occurred from one day to the next without configuration changes or patches to the server, then it is unlikely the problem will be resolved by one of the patches mentioned. Although it is always a good idea to install every patch that applies to your environment and make changes that can speed up performance. What was the result of the test with the local profile? Did you also see the slow logon even with the local profile? If you don't see the problem with the local profile then you need to look at network bottlenecks, disk access, GPO settings, etc.
As far as UPH Clean, how are these profiles you see listed on the server? Are they listed as local profiles?
Also, this may not apply at all, but I will mention it because I had a similar problem once. Have you tried using a physical Citrix server rather than a virtualized Citrix server as a ground of comparison to troubleshoot this? The reason I ask is because I was recently doing work for a client trying to determine slow logons on the virtualized Citrix environment and it turned out to be a network bottleneck in the ESX host. Reconfiguring the virtual network resolved the problem in a heart beat. The physical server we used to compare exihited none of the slow logons as the virtualized servers. Like I said, this was an isolated incident, but it doesn't hurt to check all this. Just as a last sanity check.
Yes the citrix article did dramatically improve my logon speed.
Jack,
JLH's suggestion is worth trying. However, when I made this change a few months ago, I noticed that all it did was suppress the progress logon screen and logon times were unaffected. In my case, it was actually a bad idea to make this chance since users did not know what the progress was and kept on relauncing the application. You need to try this on one server and run some tests.
Leonardo Curbelo Jr: If the problem occurred from one day to the next without configuration changes or patches to the server, then it is unlikely the problem will be resolved by one of the patches mentioned. Although it is always a good idea to install every patch that applies to your environment and make changes that can speed up performance. What was the result of the test with the local profile? Did you also see the slow logon even with the local profile? If you don't see the problem with the local profile then you need to look at network bottlenecks, disk access, GPO settings, etc. As far as UPH Clean, how are these profiles you see listed on the server? Are they listed as local profiles? Also, this may not apply at all, but I will mention it because I had a similar problem once. Have you tried using a physical Citrix server rather than a virtualized Citrix server as a ground of comparison to troubleshoot this? The reason I ask is because I was recently doing work for a client trying to determine slow logons on the virtualized Citrix environment and it turned out to be a network bottleneck in the ESX host. Reconfiguring the virtual network resolved the problem in a heart beat. The physical server we used to compare exihited none of the slow logons as the virtualized servers. Like I said, this was an isolated incident, but it doesn't hurt to check all this. Just as a last sanity check.
Local profiles logon fine.
I think I figured out the UPH Clean issue.
I do not have the ability to test a physical Citrix serer right now, but I will take a look at the virtual networking environment to see if there is anything I can change to make logons faster. I'll let you know if I see anything. Thanks.
If local profiles logon speed is fine then you know it's nothing related specifically to Citrix (printer autocreation, policies, etc). Having ruled those out, the problem falls under GPO/folder redirection, profiles on network shares, network/storage performance, etc. Look there and you will find exactly what is causing the problem. Once you find the exact cause of the problem, the solution is simple. In the computer science/IT world, finding the exact cause of the problem is the most crucial step. Once the issue has been located, there are usually several ways to fix it.
Try those steps and post back the results.
Hi Jack Johnson,
I have the same problème on a citrix server of a client...
Do you find the result of this problème of slow logon ?
I will try to uninstall an reinstall UPHClean 1.6d
Thanks you