When to use TS? (Not in an engineering firm)

Edwards Finance > General Engineering

Q. I am doing some work for an engineering firm. (around 22 people) They are running TS on a win2kSP2 dual 1GHz system with 1GB of RAM. I sometimes wonder if such a system is appropriate for an engineering firm. Why? First, they run simulations. Although, they don't run them for very long, 30min-1hr, in makes the whole system grind to a halt. I can't tell you how many complaints I get. I just tell them there is not much I can do to prevent this except to get people to run their simulations on their own computers. Second, their reports tend to be very large, 100 plus pages with many picture quality images. I once saw a Word file that occupied 180MB in RAM. Needless to say, this caused a bit of a slowdown. Third, they use MS Access. Which I have been told not to deploy on TS, but it was anyways. Thankfully, they don't use it often but when they do it just causes slowdowns. Finally, we used to be running an older version of WordPerfect. God this was a nightmare! It took me a while to finally realize that there was some kind of memory leak, which caused innocent worperfect files to explode to 900MB in RAM. With so many performance headaches such as the above, when should you deploy TS?

A. First, in some cases you will need third party tools to help. Citrix in this case can help as with MetaFrame XP FR1 you can limit CPU utilization per application. http://www.appsense.net is going to release in Q1/2002 one application that allows you to limit CPU and RAM per app/user. But the point here is, why should I use TS in such cases? The answer is simple and I will answer with one example. I got a project here in Canada to deploy Citrix MetaFrame for Unix on top of Solaris. Why? Because using X11 was impossible in low bandwidth links and they needed people to have access to the chip design/simulation software from anywhere, anytime. So in your case this may be the answer. With TS, ok, it will be slow. Without TS, no other option. In many many cases it is much better to run something slowly than not being able to run at all. And you always have the option to disconnect and leave it running, simulating or doing whatever you want, what help reducing screen slowness. Of course this server, dual with 1GB should be better. Faster and with 4GB. Lighting fast disk subsystem. Or even a pair load balanced. Anyhow, resuming, the answer is: sometimes slow is better than nothing. And this may be the case. It was for this project in Canada. Actually here the performance was great.

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