Performance? What do you mean performance?
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One of the common issues we see a lot of in the Support Cave revolves around ‘performance’. So let’s set the scene a little. When it comes to connecting to a virtual machine, remotely, from one end of the planet to the other, the number of things that can affect performance can be truly mind-boggling.
When trying to troubleshoot this, the first step is to verify what performance. Ask yourself these questions:
- Is typing, mouse and keyboard control really slow?
- Is navigating around the OS itself slow? (Opening folders, docs etc.)
- When clicking links, icons or buttons, does it feel like the VM takes a while to register?
- Is my application (SQL, SharePoint, whatever) slow to process tasks?
All of these can point to completely different problems.
First things first, make sure you’re accessing your environment from CloudShare. Makes sense right? We use some pretty nifty tech to make your connection as fast as possible. But this is only possible if you’re logged into CloudShare and view the VM using Accelerated RDP
And have our plug-in installed. If you notice the mouse lagging, I bet you’re logged in via Console (CON). Stop that, RDP’s the way.
If your OS alone feels slow, and the VM isn’t doing anything, this can be a weird one. Check Task Manager. Is it really not doing anything? How’s the CPU and RAM look? Is anything running that you don’t expect to be? Kill off unnecessary processes and see if you notice an improvement. VMs are affected by the same problems regular PCs are.
If you’re working along as normal and everything just feels sluggish, this can have a number of causes as well. If it feels like everything you do skips a beat and then works normally, like the VM’s ‘catching up’ to you – this can be network related. Essentially you’re sending a packet to the VM to do something. Somewhere along the line, that packet slows down, gets lost and eventually finds its way to the VM. Irritating, huh? It can happen, but the root problem can be anything network related. Yours, ours, the internet’s. All of it together. Solar flares! Seriously! Run our Speedtest to see if your network connection to us is good.
The next one is fun. Your apps themselves are slow? Takes ages to process anything? The first thing to check is what’s consuming your resources. 90% of the time, the system is being over-taxed. Go back to our old friend, the Task Manager and see what’s eating up RAM and CPU. If you’re solidly at 7.8 GBs of RAM out of 8 GBs – you’re out of RAM. Because what’s happening is Windows is caching the overflow to the disk and making everything even slower. So, add some RAM to that machine. On that note, don’t forget to check how much space your HDD has. If the C: drive is almost full, this will affect application performance as well. Of course, makes sure the VM has as many CPUs as it needs. In our TeamLabs and Enterprise platforms, this goes up to four cores.
Finally, if you just need to run a quick test to see what the problem might be, open a simple notepad and start typing some sentences. If the text replication is smooth, the VM itself is fine and you might want to check your resource consumption. If you see text jumping or lurching, contact the Support Cave
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