Measuring a Client's Connection over a High Latency Connection, in the Network Performance / WAN Optimization forum on BrianMadden.com

watkinscj posted on Sun, May 3 2009 9:14 AM

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I work at a company where we connect to many different client's terminal servers and Citrix servers. I am looking for a way to measure the effective latency of a server based computing connection such as Terminal Services, or Citrix. What I mean by "effective latency" is some way to simulate and measure the speed that the users feel the connection is. I am currently obviously measuring network latency but frequently find that this is not actually the main contributor to a slow down; often I find the slow down is caused by our desktop PC's or a slow server.

What I need is a consistent way to measure a connection that would measure all components which can contribute to a slow connection. This will allow me to compare connections and establish "baseline" time for all client's connections. Also, the method must not include any tool that runs on the server, it must be all on the client side.

I am currently looking at the following methods, but were not sure if anyone had some easy answers / suggestions that I may have overlooked:

1) Create a standard macro that would automate and time some tasks (e.g. opening up Word, Excel, and Adobe Acrobat).The issue I have with this idea right now is finding a way to measure a macro that factors in the rendering delay on a screen due to latency (as opposed to just clicking through the macro).

2) Network Performance Monitoring Programs such as Heroix and NetScout - I have found these products but they seem overly expensive for what we need them to do.

3) Develop a procedure that could be performend manually and timed on every client's system. I have tried timing how long it takes to open a scanned PDF Document with color images and paging down through all pages. However, due to caching the results differ significantly each time so it would not be useful to compare clients with.

Any thoughts or ideas?

Thank you.