(PeteCresswell) said:
Per Albert D. Kallal:
What does Citrix have that Windows Terminal Services does not -
in the context of an application with fewer than 10 concurrent
users and deployment within the same LAN?
Probably not a lot a difference for just ten users. However citrix does have
better tuning and it does allow some features that allow to work in a
slightly less or lower bandwidth environment. So the advantage if Citrix
might not be the number of users (server load), but in fact that you have
less bandwidth to work with.
Citrix and TS are based on really much the same technology (and, often as
new features come out for citrix...they filter down to TS). The main
advantage of Citrx is that it has better tuning options for contorl of
bandwith. For example you can limit the bandwith used by cut/paste buffer
(local to remote). So, it is a seperate channel that you can throttle. This
can be really impotrant if you have a remote office and they are all SHARING
the same LIMITED bandwith conneciton. Thus, when a user does a big cut paste
then that operation will not swamp the limited bandwidth that the 5 people
in that remove office are sharing. I believe there is also additional tuning
options that you can use with respect to things like sound, and printer
performance.
There's also another interesting feature and citrix that allows local echo
of characters in particular applications before the character actually makes
the roundtrip. This is much like a hybrid half duplix system if you remember
text and using dial up modems. This echo system means when you type the
character in word you will see the character appear RIGHT away instead of
that charcter going up throught the network to the server and then coming
back down the wire. So each keypress has to make a round trip to the
terminal server and back. Citrix allows "local" echo and this feature can
improve the response time of application by quite a bit. In some cases you
have enough bandwidth, but you have what's called a low latency (low latency
simply means that the time for a packet on the network to "respond" or to
"start going" is rather large. A good example is would be a satellite
connection that's fast, but there still a lot of time delay. Even with the
speed of light, it about 1/4 of a second to go up to satellite and back down
to earth. Add a bunch of network stuff, and your delay before you see your
character with full duplex could be 1/2 second, or more. So, you might have
tons of speed, but lots of delay in the system. This echo feature does not
work in all applications, but it works for the most common ones.
I really don't have experience with citrix but I have done some reading on
it in the past and citrix simply has more "tuning" options with regards to
bandwith (and I suppose this would require more experience to set up and run
because of more things that you can set and control).
As I mentioned it's very possible to some of these features of citrix have
moved down into terminal services. You'd probably be best off to ask in a
newsgroup dedicated to terminal services or citrix as to the particular or
significant differences.
