Performance tuning when published via Citrix XenApp?

[peter.kovac]

I am evaluating NoMachine as a remote access solution.  I am generally impressed by the features and support response, but I am thus far unable to get acceptable performance from a remote session.  When connecting from a machine on the local network I have a couple of non-standard requirements forced upon me so I wanted to ask if there’s some tuning available that I haven’t seen.  Essentially, the situation is:

– VMWare-based infrastructure — all linux hosts we want to access via NX are VMs running within VMWare

– The only off-site access I have is through a Citrix NetScaler VPN solution.  Some of my users MUST use XenApp published applications rather than full VPN

I setup a test VM (4 core, 8G RAM, RHEL6 x86_64, selinux enabled, based on STIG lockdowns) with the current release of the evaluation version of NoMachine Enterprise Desktop.  I bought an AVC pack for the client and compiled the x264 libraries for the client and I’m connecting using H.264 (confirmed from the client config/display).

Connecting from within the local network, everything is smooth and snappy.  I published the NX enterprise client via Citrix XenApp and connected to my test machine (again, h.264) and it’s very laggy.  Dragging windows, etc is nearly unusable.  I setup a test using a SPICE client (via an ovirt test setup, again published through citrix) and it’s must faster.

I suspect I’m missing something — anyone have advise on how to improve this?  I’d really like to use NoMachine for a variety or reasons but I won’t be able to as is.

[titan]

I published the NX enterprise client via Citrix XenApp and connected to my test machine (again, h.264) and it’s very laggy.

If I understand correctly, the NoMachine client is running on the server and its output is encoded by Citrix XenApp and forwarded to the XenApp client at the remote location (through the NetScaler VPN). So (again if I understand correctly) NoMachine encoding is taking place between the XenApp server (where the NoMachine client is running) and the NoMachine Enterprise Desktop, with the NoMachine client displaying its output as if the XenApp backend was the real display. If this is the case, I’m afraid this looks more a Citrix performance problem than a NoMachine performance problem.

I read that this is not possible in your case, due to other constraints, but can you compare the performance connecting directly from the client side to the NoMachine Enterprise Desktop machine using the NoMachine client and the same NetScaler VPN link? This could be a good starting point.

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