Query for Vera and other experienced users out there..

[Guest]

Archived from groups: microsoft.public.windowsnt.terminalserver.connectivity (More info?)

Vera, other great and learned ones-

I'm looking for some "testimonials" of people's experiences of TS 2003 in
different network bandwidth enviroments. Pretending, that our intrepid user
was only using your basics (Office 2003, Internet, email) what would there
performance by like in say a 10mb switched enviroment vs his normal
enviroment of 100mb switched? Would performance drop noticeably? What about
in 10mb non-switched? Dial-up?

Carrying this further, anythoughts on a simple move like dropping resolution
to 800x600 and color depth to 8 bit (256k) improve the performance in the
lower bandwidth areas?

Sorry the above situations are less than specific. It was a question that
was posed earlier while we working on a rollout for a pilot program, and I
thought I'd get some input from the more experienced users on the subject.
So, any thoughts or guidenance where to research this?

Thanks

Jim

 

[Guest]

Archived from groups: microsoft.public.windowsnt.terminalserver.connectivity (More info?)

Hopefully I'm not stepping on Vera's toes by answering this...

If we make the assumption that there is no latency difference between 100
and 10Mbit connections as well as no latency difference between 10Mbit
switched versus non-switched, then I doubt you'd see any difference in the
way terminal services works from a client-side. However, from my own
experience, I can definitely tell when I'm on a 10Mbit switched and
non-switched connection, although the difference between 10 and 100 isn't as
noticable. For the most part, I doubt a user is going to complaint. For the
most part, terminal services and the RDP protocol was made to use as little
bandwidth as possible, although there is no limit as to the maximum amount of
bandwidth it'll use. For instance, just typing on Word uses almost no
bandwidth, so if you had 20 people all typing you'd be just fine with a
10Mbit unswitched connection. On the otherhand, during lunch when everyone
decides to watch the Star Wars trailer at full resolution, you are definitely
going to see some slow downs, since the RDP protocol will try to push as much
data down to the user. As you can imagine, your line will get seriously
congested very quickly. dial-up is the same way. If they are just typing,
things will be fine, but as soon as the screen needs to be refreshed, like if
they search the document, then they'll see slow downs.

And as you'd expect, using more colors will definitely use more bandwidth.
Using more colors requires that your client be more powerful to handle the
additional graphics and network load. I have some older Wyse winterms that
become a tiny bit slower when 16-bit color mode is turned on. If I were a
dial-up user, I would stay as far away from 16-bit color mode as I could.
The bandwidth required will surely cause some annoyed users.

-M

"James Blair" wrote:

> Vera, other great and learned ones-
>
> I'm looking for some "testimonials" of people's experiences of TS 2003 in
> different network bandwidth enviroments. Pretending, that our intrepid user
> was only using your basics (Office 2003, Internet, email) what would there
> performance by like in say a 10mb switched enviroment vs his normal
> enviroment of 100mb switched? Would performance drop noticeably? What about
> in 10mb non-switched? Dial-up?
>
> Carrying this further, anythoughts on a simple move like dropping resolution
> to 800x600 and color depth to 8 bit (256k) improve the performance in the
> lower bandwidth areas?
>
> Sorry the above situations are less than specific. It was a question that
> was posed earlier while we working on a rollout for a pilot program, and I
> thought I'd get some input from the more experienced users on the subject.
> So, any thoughts or guidenance where to research this?
>
> Thanks
>
> Jim
>
>
>

 

[Guest]

Archived from groups: microsoft.public.windowsnt.terminalserver.connectivity (More info?)

No problem, Matthew!
I was actually hoping that someone else would answer this one.
I can only add to your post: printing can take huge resources in
terms of bandwidth.

--
Vera Noest
MCSE, CCEA, Microsoft MVP - Terminal Server
http://hem.fyristorg.com/vera/IT
--- please respond in newsgroup, NOT by private email ---

"=?Utf-8?B?TWF0dGhldyBIYXJyaXMgW01WUF0=?="
<harris@crocker.ucdavis.edu> wrote on 03 dec 2004 in
microsoft.public.windowsnt.terminalserver.connectivity:

> Hopefully I'm not stepping on Vera's toes by answering this...
>
> If we make the assumption that there is no latency difference
> between 100 and 10Mbit connections as well as no latency
> difference between 10Mbit switched versus non-switched, then I
> doubt you'd see any difference in the way terminal services
> works from a client-side. However, from my own experience, I
> can definitely tell when I'm on a 10Mbit switched and
> non-switched connection, although the difference between 10 and
> 100 isn't as noticable. For the most part, I doubt a user is
> going to complaint. For the most part, terminal services and
> the RDP protocol was made to use as little bandwidth as
> possible, although there is no limit as to the maximum amount of
> bandwidth it'll use. For instance, just typing on Word uses
> almost no bandwidth, so if you had 20 people all typing you'd be
> just fine with a 10Mbit unswitched connection. On the
> otherhand, during lunch when everyone decides to watch the Star
> Wars trailer at full resolution, you are definitely going to see
> some slow downs, since the RDP protocol will try to push as much
> data down to the user. As you can imagine, your line will get
> seriously congested very quickly. dial-up is the same way. If
> they are just typing, things will be fine, but as soon as the
> screen needs to be refreshed, like if they search the document,
> then they'll see slow downs.
>
> And as you'd expect, using more colors will definitely use more
> bandwidth. Using more colors requires that your client be more
> powerful to handle the additional graphics and network load. I
> have some older Wyse winterms that become a tiny bit slower when
> 16-bit color mode is turned on. If I were a dial-up user, I
> would stay as far away from 16-bit color mode as I could. The
> bandwidth required will surely cause some annoyed users.
>
> -M
>
> "James Blair" wrote:
>
>> Vera, other great and learned ones-
>>
>> I'm looking for some "testimonials" of people's experiences of
>> TS 2003 in different network bandwidth enviroments.
>> Pretending, that our intrepid user was only using your basics
>> (Office 2003, Internet, email) what would there performance by
>> like in say a 10mb switched enviroment vs his normal enviroment
>> of 100mb switched? Would performance drop noticeably? What
>> about in 10mb non-switched? Dial-up?
>>
>> Carrying this further, anythoughts on a simple move like
>> dropping resolution to 800x600 and color depth to 8 bit (256k)
>> improve the performance in the lower bandwidth areas?
>>
>> Sorry the above situations are less than specific. It was a
>> question that was posed earlier while we working on a rollout
>> for a pilot program, and I thought I'd get some input from the
>> more experienced users on the subject. So, any thoughts or
>> guidenance where to research this?
>>
>> Thanks
>>
>> Jim