Citrix Bandwidth

Basically it's all a matter of priorities. More bandwith gives more responsiveness, but also costs more. You'll have to find a break even point that is acceptable for your organization.

In the meanwhile you can do a few things to speed things upa bit:
- use 256 colors on the citrix server. Zillions of colors cost more bytes per pixel, and transferring pixels is exactly what you do with citrix.
- use no background wallpaper. A uniform background color compresses nicely.
- Make the desktop as empty as possible, preferrably only a few icons your users really need to start their applications.

Hope this helps...

b.t.w. the issue doesn't seem very important, hence the 5 points? you're not going to attract much attention with 5 points...

Point value changed by question poster.

Certainly it's said that the Citrix ICA client will work with as little as a 14.4 k connection...but that *really* depends on how it is configured and what is being run. The ICA client does a great job of utilizing bandwidth and the speedscreen technology can help performance dramatically.

From my experience (working on a 6000+ user LAN/WAN with remote clients connecting via VPN), a 56k connection is adequate for most functionality, but when shadowing etc, it is apparent that there is a reduction of performance compared to the LAN. On my broadband connection at home (cable), it works seamlessly (no puns intended).

Bear in mind the applications, the graphics levels, and the sound levels all influence bandwidth requirements and performance. For example, the different sound level requirements are - High: 1.3 Mbps Medium: 64 Kbps Low: 16 Kbps.

Here is Citrix's whitepapers on bandwidth:

http://knowledgebase.citrix.com/SERVICESOFT/DATA/CITRIXKB/document/whitepapers/client/ICA_Client_Bandwidth_Analysis.pdf

http://knowledgebase.citrix.com/SERVICESOFT/DATA/CITRIXKB/document/whitepapers/client/ICA_Client_Bandwidth_Analysis_Test_Environment.pdf

And a couple other articles that may be of interest (including a 3rd party analysis):

http://www.networkmagazine.com/article/NMG20000426S0025/2

http://www.asiweb.com/products/citrix/winframe/tolly.pdf

Hope something here is helpful to you...and you get Citrix functioning as you wish. I certainly think highly of the product and even got my CCA Certification.

Good luck!

I've read many articles on this topic like:
http://www.tolly.com/News/KT_NWW/20000111budget.asp that suggest that the bandwidth requirements for ICA are higher than previously thought.

My question is rather trivial. I like Citrix. I want to use it *when it makes sense*. I would just like to have more data when I am making descions about implemeting this technology.