Theres no place like "home"., in the Performance Tuning / Server Sizing forum on BrianMadden.com

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Chris Norman Posted: Thu, Jan 22 2009 10:45 AM

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Howdy folks. 

I've noticed that our file server can sometimes affect Citrix performance even if the user is not really rooting through drive mappings looking for files.   We have roughly 1500 people hitting a single win 2003 64bit file server with various mappings.   All the Storage is on the SAN.   Sometimes we may have a backup problem or an admin may do a transfer that will affect performance.   Or just some random problem that may affect performance on the file server.   It's not important what the cause is for this post.  The point is when it happens it seems to affect everyone no matter what they are doing. 

We map an H: drive in AD as the user’s home drive on this file server.   So when users launch anything the first place that gets queried for the app is H.  Launch a cmd prompt if you have a home drive set in AD.   Look where it's launching from.   It will be your Home drive on the file server.    What I'm wondering is if we decided not to use AD to map H would this help with performance?  Let's say I set H to their home folder on the file server in a log in script with the rest of the mappings.   Would these launch applications on a local citrix server drive VS looking to the mappings for the app?   I think this would actually make apps launch much quicker. 

There’s the question of that windows folder that gets generated in home.   I think if there's no home it will just go into the local appdata of the file server.   Someone correct me if I'm wrong on this. 

Has anyone out there tried this?  

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Conrad Lunderstedt replied on Mon, Jan 26 2009 7:21 AM

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If I understand your question correctly then I don't think it matters how you map your drives.  The performance of your Citrix server should not be impacted by the performance of your file server- unless of course you are accessing the file server at the time (logon, logoff accessing documents etc). 

As this seems to be the case, I would look at the architecture and determine why the Citrix server is accessing the file server when it should be accessing the local disk?