Issues with Terminal Server

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Digital-Vortex

Gawd
Joined
Dec 11, 2001
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Hi everyone.
Thought this might do better here rather than the OS section being a network service.
Anyway. We have a Windows server 2012 running RDS Session based Desktops. Its being used as a terminal server so all users work from this system. around 30-40 users and spec wise everything fine with plenty of overhead in each area. all users have laptops which are locked down so they only have a shortcut to the server. All on the local LAN so no WAN connections at this point.

The users are complaining for issues with Lag in typing and the cursors jumping around the screen randomly which im bashing my head off the wall to find a cause for.

We have checked drivers on all sides, up to date and no issues that we can see.(and different laptops)
Moved users to cabled connections rather than wireless with a little improvement but still happening.
Have users with external mice and keyboards to see if that works (nope)

Looking for any suggestions on where to look for this as even MS is a bit stuck.
 
what are the server specs?
last we had something similar at work, it was the sessions hanging up for a 1/2 second while everyone was doing something...looked like the keyboard/mouse would freeze, but actually was just hung and slow while input was typed in...when it came up the text filled in
 
I cant see it being server specs.
Its 24 cores with 96GB Ram, memory is under 50%, cpu spike to 60 under heavy load and disk speeds are fine.

Its also not impacting all users at once. Some can be fine while others have the issues.
 
Digital-Vortex said:
I cant see it being server specs.
Its 24 cores with 96GB Ram, memory is under 50%, cpu spike to 60 under heavy load and disk speeds are fine.

Its also not impacting all users at once. Some can be fine while others have the issues.
Click to expand...

What do you have for network gear? Are you seeing any congestion? Are they all daisy chained together willy nilly, etc?
 
Wireless is Uni-Fi AP's, around 15 users max per disk.
Central switch is HP 1910-48G connected to a netgear basic switch for the servers.
 
What does your network look like? What kind of apps are users running?

You have the servers running through a Netgear dumb switch, than going to the HP?
 
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Correct, Access points and servers into the netgear (planning on swapping that for an HP 1810 I have spare) and then to the 1910-48 for end points.

Load is mostly office 2013 and internet. most demanding is an office plugin that connects to a hosted database for client info.
 
Why not connect servers directly to 1910? I would at least try that.
Does unresponsiveness happen when accessing DB?
Most issues I've had with TS/RDS unresponsiveness come from network latency/network connectivity issues. I haven't used 2012 RDS yet (2008r2) but will be upgrading shortly.
Are you running your RDS in a VM or on hardware?
 
Mainly due to Gigabit ports. we only get 2 on the 1910 but we need some more for backups. even with this ping tests showed a max of 4ms and average of 1ms response times to the server.

The main issue is not so much an unresponsiveness. its more the mouse and cursor moving on its own resulting in text being all over the place when typing. it also impacts the whole system as far as we can tell so cant tie it to the DB software.

server is also a physical server. no virtual.
 
Ping tests aren't the whole story.
I still suspect latency on the network. What NICs and drivers are on the Server?
If you care to diverge a little, why not virtualize? The server seems overkill for 40 users, and the bright spot of 2012 is managing virtual servers- even better than iron. Not trying to start anything, just curious.
 
That's great around the RAM and CPU maximums but what about storage / HDD what is that looking like and have you ran any performance monitoring on that medium such as average service time, wait io, latency from request to servce IO etc? you need to run it whilst the users are complaining of mouse / pointer issues.

Are there any schedules tasks that run alongside these issues, such as backups, scheduled jobs etc?
 
101001101 said:
That's great around the RAM and CPU maximums but what about storage / HDD what is that looking like and have you ran any performance monitoring on that medium such as average service time, wait io, latency from request to servce IO etc? you need to run it whilst the users are complaining of mouse / pointer issues.

Are there any schedules tasks that run alongside these issues, such as backups, scheduled jobs etc?
Click to expand...

You usually get the hourglass/rotating cursor if waiting for HDD/storage access, or waiting on a process- just like a regular desktop session. In my experience, jumping/unresponsive cursor is connection related.

Have you checked the logs/events?
 
Here's another vote for taking a look at the network in more detail... What model netgear switch do you have? I've seen low end network gear that fall apart under load... It's not always about bandwidth, but they just don't have the horsepower to handle the packets per second for heavier network services.

You mentioned having ping times at 4ms... That's actually pretty high for a wired LAN.

It might be a good idea to check the network cables too. It's amazing what kind of havoc a bad cable can wreak. (And just because it's a new cable doesn't mean it couldn't be bad... I just pulled a name brand name cable out of the package last week, and it would only sync between the switch and server at 100 Mbit... On testing it, it had a bad 7,8 pair.........)
 
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