Why is Citrix Slow? & How the 30 Second Challenge Fixes It

 Why is Citrix slow?

I have heard this question several thousand times over the last 15+ years.  It only took me that long to work out a good answer. 

Short answer:  Citrix is only ACTUALLY causing the slow response 20-30% of the time.  The rest of the time it is coming from three primary culprits, Active Directory, your SQL database or your storage/SAN/NAS.  If I had to pick one place to look for a reason as to why Citrix was slow, I would start with Active Directory.

I have discovered, though, that most of the time when I hear this question no one really wants to know the answer, they just want the slowness to stop, right now, heck even yesterday would not have been too soon.

To that end, we not only have answer to the question of “Why is Citrix slow?” but an answer as to how to identify and fix the underlying problem.

We have taken everything we have learned about improving Citrix performance, across all of the pieces that touch Citrix (yes that includes you Active Directory, SQL, SAN, hypervisor, network, client device, etc.) and distilled that into a defined process (that we do not have a fancy name for yet) that just makes Citrix environments perform better.

We call this the Citrix 30 Second Challenge and the offer is this…

With 8 hours of uninterrupted time with your Citrix environment we guarantee that we can get your login times to 30 seconds or faster.  

If we are successful, you pay for the 8 hours of time our team spent, if for some reason we are not successful, you pay nothing and can feel better that your team has done all that can be done to improve the environment without adding third party tools and widgets.

The process is simple:

• We baseline your access times today.
• We apply our magic to a test image and make our optimizations.
• We compare the end result to the baseline.

We are averaging improvement ranging from 37% up to 90%  While login times have been reduced in each case, but the underlying factor contributing to the slow response times was different.

If you are ready for a better Citrix experience the Whitehat Citrix team would be glad to assist.  Whitehat manages or hosts several thousand Citrix seats for our customers, with login times averaging 17 seconds.