30 ms·

Try working in banking for 20 years, stuck behind at least 1 layer of citrix living in citrix inception. Latency for every keystroke, your brain starts to add l

Try working in banking for 20 years, stuck behind at least 1 layer of citrix living in citrix inception. Latency for every keystroke, your brain starts to add latency to latency that is not there to compensate for a life lived wearing citrix latency goggles.

just_boost_it 4y ago
I quit a job because of citrix. Exactly like you said, very noticeable latency. It ate into my productivity as a part of my mental energy was going into waiting for feedback to my actions to appear on screen.
- raxxorraxor 4y ago
  > part of my mental energy was going into waiting for feedback to my actions to appear on screen This should not be underestimated. I was in a situation like this and I though my short term memory stopped working. I forget what steps I already did because some actions took 10-15 seconds. I often switched to another task in the meantime and could not recollect the last step I did 10 seconds ago. Such delays are poison for for intellectual task where you would need concentration for. There is no excuse for any modern device to make such pauses. It is also far too expensive for any company. The price for hardware is too low to let any user wait.
  - just_boost_it 4y ago
    That's exactly it. Instead of tasks going "1, 2, 3" in my head, it was more like "1,...,1,...,1". I had to keep reloading every task into my working memory, with lots of brief pauses to think "did that click register", or "when I typed those words, was the context on that text box?". It's a truly torturous level of friction.
- hirvi74 4y ago
  > part of my mental energy was going into waiting for feedback to my actions to appear on screen. Sounds like my life as a developer too. =D
- lovehashbrowns 4y ago
  I didn’t deal with citrix but I did have to frequently SSH into cruise ships at a job some years ago. Goodness was the latency frustrating beyond belief. I didn’t last more than 6 months at that job. Every single command input/key stroke could take 2-5+ seconds to display on my screen. Imagine trying to troubleshoot something critical in that type of environment. Luckily, I didn’t encounter anything truly critical, it was mostly maintenance tasks and such.
sshagent 4y ago
Ergh! You're giving me PTSD. I still recall those days shudder Best of luck with that
joshxyz 4y ago
Traumatically well written lol
kmarc 4y ago
O.o Rarely see people like us here! :-) For me what worked is a setup where I used an Arch linux laptop, ran f5vpn in docker and used the citrix client with some tweaks through that vpn connection. It was a lot faster than my colleagues' Mac / Win client, and even better, it was automatable to start up and run everything. Ha! I did document this beautiful setup: https://github.com/kmARC/f5vpn-in-docker https://github.com/kmARC/f5vpn-in-docker
- irusensei 4y ago
  My employer blocks Linux clients for whatever reason. Even if you pass through the initial checks there is some kind of system on the Remote Desktop that detects your local setup and kicks you out. So I use a KVM Windows machine with Virtio drivers. QXL seems to be the best video solution.
tmaly 4y ago
reminds me of the days of dial up modem.
bonyt 4y ago
I am at a law firm that uses a remote system like that. Have definitely gone two Citrix’s deep for some things, so I feel this. Honestly, though, it’s better than the laptop the other firms have given me. One took over 10 minutes to boot, iirc. It wasn’t just the hardware, there was just so much … stuff, multiple layers of antivirus seemingly hooking all of the system calls and fighting with each other, and a document management system with blocking I/O everywhere that was somehow so embedded in Windows that it could seem to freeze the whole system. The thin client setup may have latency, but at least it is convenient and it gets there eventually. Though I would swear it’s getting slower, or maybe my patience is waning.
candiddevmike 4y ago
Printing worked great though, right?
jiggawatts 4y ago
I was a "Citrix consultant" for about two decades. I'd walk into customer sites for the first time, meet people, and within minutes they would start ranting about how bad Citrix is. I suspect only dentists get this kind of feedback from customers before a procedure. Having said that, 99% of the time the problem boils down to this: The guy (and it is a guy) signing the cheques either doesn't use Citrix OR uses it from the head office with the 10 Gbps link. The poor schmuck in the backwater rural branch office on a 512 Kbps link shared by two dozen staff gets no say in anything, especially not the WAN link capacity. I've seen large distributed orgs that were 100% Citrix "ugprade" from 2 Mbps WAN links to 4 Mbps to "alleviate network congestion" in an era where 100 Mbps fibre-to-the-home is standard. With 2 Mbps you can watch PDF documents slooooowly draw across the screen, top-to-bottom, line by line. Reminds me of the 2400 baud days in the early 90s downloading the first digital porn, eagerly watching the pixels filling the screen. Don't blame Citrix. Blame the bastard in the head office that doesn't give a f%@$ about anyone not him.
- prepend 4y ago
  It seems to me that the reason why so many bad enterprise solutions are bought is because the buyer is not the user. It’s such a funny thing to me that people would spend tons of money without firsthand experience or at least someone they trust using it.
- acdha 4y ago
  I agree in general but I do blame Citrix for some foot-guns. The Citrix admins at my employer have never figured out how to configure it to get keyboard latency below ~120ms (on a gigabit LAN), and the silly health meter always reports the connection as excellent. This is mostly on them - in classic enterprise IT thinking, if it’s not down your job is done - but I’m somewhat disappointed that it’s even possible to configure it to have latency twice that of a modem.
  - zasdffaa 4y ago
    A 120ms should feel immediate. IIRC anything under 300ms feels instant.
flanbiscuit 4y ago
This is me right now, but only for a short time (I hope). I'm at an agency and currently on my first ever banking client. I'm on a Mac but I use Citrix Viewer to access a Windows 10 machine. The part I dislike the most is the context switching between Mac and Windows. First off, windows doesn't natively let you customize the keys (I can't install anything obviously, it's a bank client). Also, for some reason, the alt key doesn't work in the Citrix Viewer so I have to change a lot of my usual VSCode shortcuts to sone custom ones. I've googled the issue and some people on Mac use a program called Karabiner[1] but I didn't want to install yet another program, I'm just dealing with it for now. Our agency has another banking client that I hear sends you a laptop, I much rather have that. [1] https://karabiner-elements.pqrs.org/ https://karabiner-elements.pqrs.org/
boppo1 4y ago
What kind of banking? Tell me people aren't doing excel modeling through a laggy pipe
irusensei 4y ago
Hah now imagine using Teams through Citrix workspace. One thing I've learned about Citrix is that its a startup company with limited resources to handle all the bugs and crusty corpocrapware layers. The client craps on my HDR setup. It install a ton of crap you don't need and it relies on crap like HDX software running on your machine that last time I've checked it didn't had ARM binaries but this tech is also unavailable for the iOS clients. Meanwhile RDP can do semi-decent multimedia stuff without any of this crap.
- rrdharan 4y ago
  Amusingly Microsoft purchased RDP from Citrix (like 30 years ago). See version 4: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remote_Desktop_Protocol https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remote_Desktop_Protocol
- blevin 4y ago
  > One thing I've learned about Citrix is that its a startup company Founded 1989, 2021 revenue over $3B
  - irusensei 4y ago
    </sarcasm>
roywiggins 4y ago
Maybe I'm immune to it, or just lucky, but two hops (Logging it at home to a Citrix Network Desktop to Remote Desktop to the PC in my office) has been shockingly fine. I live very close to the servers in question though, so speed of light isn't a limiting factor, and I have solid and reasonably fast home internet. It can work fine.
leokennis 4y ago
I work in banking. Everything company-hosted I access via a split tunnel VPN. Everything else goes through the normal internet connection, with a company root CA inserted to sniff HTTPS traffic. One of the lucky few I guess :-)
markandrewj 4y ago
This has been my experience with Citrix also, although I have heard it can be set up to work better. Has anyone had experience with HP Anywhere/Teradaci? I am curious how it would compare.
omh 4y ago
[ Disclaimer - I am responsible for a Citrix environment, but I'm reasonably proud of how well it works for our company ] The technology behind remote desktops is fundamentally limited but I'm amazed at how good the user experience can be on a modern well-configured Citrix environment. - The protocol responds well even on low bandwidth as long as latency is OK. On the office LAN it feels like a local computer. - There is offloading for Teams[1], media streams[2] and even entire web browsers[3]. The tech behind this is impressive and it works pretty well (mostly!) - For most staff it's easier to use a thin client or a minimal laptop. - I can keep the Citrix environment patched and managed much more easily than a proliferation of laptops and home devices. It can be a struggle at times and it's definitely not the right fit for developers. But it's got a lot of advantages and most of the time it works amazingly well. [1] https://docs.citrix.com/en-us/citrix-virtual-apps-desktops/multimedia/opt-ms-teams.html https://docs.citrix.com/en-us/citrix-virtual-apps-desktops/m... [2] https://docs.citrix.com/en-us/citrix-virtual-apps-desktops/multimedia/windows-media-redirection.html https://docs.citrix.com/en-us/citrix-virtual-apps-desktops/m... [3] https://docs.citrix.com/en-us/citrix-virtual-apps-desktops/multimedia/browser-content-redirection.html https://docs.citrix.com/en-us/citrix-virtual-apps-desktops/m...
caycep 4y ago
Or healthcare.....
AshamedCaptain 4y ago
You simply get used to it. In many industry sectors (think CPU architects), multiple layers of inception is the norm (crossing multiple operating systems), and it is not strange for a keystroke to take 2 seconds, and for a menu to open and finish rendering in 10 seconds. This "experience" is probably the reason why I can still comfortably work over a DSL link with just network X (even though I still find NX much more comfortable). You really just adapt your way of interacting, and start planning more carefully every one of your actions instead of simply clickety-clacketing everywhere like if you were trying to win a game of Starcraft. It's practically subconscious and it really changes you. I always think it must be much, much worse for blind people. It also reminds me of people who complain that 5-minute build times "impair their productivity". How do you even work on _any_ mid-sized commercial codebase then ? It's not that uncommon for a build to take hours (e.g. games), and in engineering it is also not that uncommon for builds to take _days_ even on powerful server farms.
- ilaksh 4y ago
  You're a CPU architect and you wait 2 seconds for a keystroke? And you stay in that job? You must be one of the dumbest geniuses I have ever met. That's absolutely ludicrous that anyone would be expected to work that way.
  - imtringued 4y ago
    There is a long queue of geniuses waiting for this genius to quit.
AtNightWeCode 4y ago
Worked with Citrix for years at different customers. Think it is more about setup. Server capacity, bandwidth and so on. Often Citrix was used for connecting to a bastion or a jump host. Then an extra hop to the target machine. Some setups were laggy. Some worked just fine.
m463 4y ago
Don't worry, I'm sure that will all be folded into microsoft teams soon :) More seriously, I'm reminded of something a friend always said. You need to have a response time of 1/10 of a second or less for something to be interactive. I remember that but I wonder if the brain fixes it like it ignores your blind spot.
assttoasstmgr 4y ago
Does everyone here just suffer from exceptionally shitty IT departments? I've used Citrix for years and not experienced any of the chronic issues described here. Remember Citrix was developed in the 1990s... the days of Windows NT 3.5/4.0 [1] & Dial-Up connections and to be able to function well in these low bandwidth environments (we're talking kilobits here people, a 10 Mbps LAN was considered glorious at the time). For years ICA was superior to RDP due to its better compression over such connections. It sounds more like whoever setup your environments didn't know what he was doing and the results are what you would expect. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SNJiWPU4HEU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SNJiWPU4HEU
- nikau 4y ago
  Citrix performance can depend a lot on the apps - older win32 apps work really well as the object caching masked the latency on windows and buttons. Newer apps seem to somehow make the caching not very effective.

just_boost_it 4y ago

I quit a job because of citrix. Exactly like you said, very noticeable latency. It ate into my productivity as a part of my mental energy was going into waiting for feedback to my actions to appear on screen.

raxxorraxor 4y ago
> part of my mental energy was going into waiting for feedback to my actions to appear on screen This should not be underestimated. I was in a situation like this and I though my short term memory stopped working. I forget what steps I already did because some actions took 10-15 seconds. I often switched to another task in the meantime and could not recollect the last step I did 10 seconds ago. Such delays are poison for for intellectual task where you would need concentration for. There is no excuse for any modern device to make such pauses. It is also far too expensive for any company. The price for hardware is too low to let any user wait.
- just_boost_it 4y ago
  That's exactly it. Instead of tasks going "1, 2, 3" in my head, it was more like "1,...,1,...,1". I had to keep reloading every task into my working memory, with lots of brief pauses to think "did that click register", or "when I typed those words, was the context on that text box?". It's a truly torturous level of friction.
hirvi74 4y ago
> part of my mental energy was going into waiting for feedback to my actions to appear on screen. Sounds like my life as a developer too. =D
lovehashbrowns 4y ago
I didn’t deal with citrix but I did have to frequently SSH into cruise ships at a job some years ago. Goodness was the latency frustrating beyond belief. I didn’t last more than 6 months at that job. Every single command input/key stroke could take 2-5+ seconds to display on my screen. Imagine trying to troubleshoot something critical in that type of environment. Luckily, I didn’t encounter anything truly critical, it was mostly maintenance tasks and such.

sshagent 4y ago

Ergh! You're giving me PTSD. I still recall those days shudder Best of luck with that

joshxyz 4y ago

Traumatically well written lol

kmarc 4y ago

O.o Rarely see people like us here! :-) For me what worked is a setup where I used an Arch linux laptop, ran f5vpn in docker and used the citrix client with some tweaks through that vpn connection. It was a lot faster than my colleagues' Mac / Win client, and even better, it was automatable to start up and run everything. Ha! I did document this beautiful setup: https://github.com/kmARC/f5vpn-in-docker https://github.com/kmARC/f5vpn-in-docker

irusensei 4y ago
My employer blocks Linux clients for whatever reason. Even if you pass through the initial checks there is some kind of system on the Remote Desktop that detects your local setup and kicks you out. So I use a KVM Windows machine with Virtio drivers. QXL seems to be the best video solution.

tmaly 4y ago

reminds me of the days of dial up modem.

bonyt 4y ago

I am at a law firm that uses a remote system like that. Have definitely gone two Citrix’s deep for some things, so I feel this. Honestly, though, it’s better than the laptop the other firms have given me. One took over 10 minutes to boot, iirc. It wasn’t just the hardware, there was just so much … stuff, multiple layers of antivirus seemingly hooking all of the system calls and fighting with each other, and a document management system with blocking I/O everywhere that was somehow so embedded in Windows that it could seem to freeze the whole system. The thin client setup may have latency, but at least it is convenient and it gets there eventually. Though I would swear it’s getting slower, or maybe my patience is waning.

candiddevmike 4y ago

Printing worked great though, right?

jiggawatts 4y ago

I was a "Citrix consultant" for about two decades. I'd walk into customer sites for the first time, meet people, and within minutes they would start ranting about how bad Citrix is. I suspect only dentists get this kind of feedback from customers before a procedure. Having said that, 99% of the time the problem boils down to this: The guy (and it is a guy) signing the cheques either doesn't use Citrix OR uses it from the head office with the 10 Gbps link. The poor schmuck in the backwater rural branch office on a 512 Kbps link shared by two dozen staff gets no say in anything, especially not the WAN link capacity. I've seen large distributed orgs that were 100% Citrix "ugprade" from 2 Mbps WAN links to 4 Mbps to "alleviate network congestion" in an era where 100 Mbps fibre-to-the-home is standard. With 2 Mbps you can watch PDF documents slooooowly draw across the screen, top-to-bottom, line by line. Reminds me of the 2400 baud days in the early 90s downloading the first digital porn, eagerly watching the pixels filling the screen. Don't blame Citrix. Blame the bastard in the head office that doesn't give a f%@$ about anyone not him.

prepend 4y ago
It seems to me that the reason why so many bad enterprise solutions are bought is because the buyer is not the user. It’s such a funny thing to me that people would spend tons of money without firsthand experience or at least someone they trust using it.
acdha 4y ago
I agree in general but I do blame Citrix for some foot-guns. The Citrix admins at my employer have never figured out how to configure it to get keyboard latency below ~120ms (on a gigabit LAN), and the silly health meter always reports the connection as excellent. This is mostly on them - in classic enterprise IT thinking, if it’s not down your job is done - but I’m somewhat disappointed that it’s even possible to configure it to have latency twice that of a modem.
- zasdffaa 4y ago
  A 120ms should feel immediate. IIRC anything under 300ms feels instant.

flanbiscuit 4y ago

This is me right now, but only for a short time (I hope). I'm at an agency and currently on my first ever banking client. I'm on a Mac but I use Citrix Viewer to access a Windows 10 machine. The part I dislike the most is the context switching between Mac and Windows. First off, windows doesn't natively let you customize the keys (I can't install anything obviously, it's a bank client). Also, for some reason, the alt key doesn't work in the Citrix Viewer so I have to change a lot of my usual VSCode shortcuts to sone custom ones. I've googled the issue and some people on Mac use a program called Karabiner[1] but I didn't want to install yet another program, I'm just dealing with it for now. Our agency has another banking client that I hear sends you a laptop, I much rather have that. [1] https://karabiner-elements.pqrs.org/ https://karabiner-elements.pqrs.org/

boppo1 4y ago

What kind of banking? Tell me people aren't doing excel modeling through a laggy pipe

irusensei 4y ago

Hah now imagine using Teams through Citrix workspace. One thing I've learned about Citrix is that its a startup company with limited resources to handle all the bugs and crusty corpocrapware layers. The client craps on my HDR setup. It install a ton of crap you don't need and it relies on crap like HDX software running on your machine that last time I've checked it didn't had ARM binaries but this tech is also unavailable for the iOS clients. Meanwhile RDP can do semi-decent multimedia stuff without any of this crap.

rrdharan 4y ago
Amusingly Microsoft purchased RDP from Citrix (like 30 years ago). See version 4: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remote_Desktop_Protocol https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remote_Desktop_Protocol
blevin 4y ago
> One thing I've learned about Citrix is that its a startup company Founded 1989, 2021 revenue over $3B
- irusensei 4y ago
  </sarcasm>

roywiggins 4y ago

Maybe I'm immune to it, or just lucky, but two hops (Logging it at home to a Citrix Network Desktop to Remote Desktop to the PC in my office) has been shockingly fine. I live very close to the servers in question though, so speed of light isn't a limiting factor, and I have solid and reasonably fast home internet. It can work fine.

leokennis 4y ago

I work in banking. Everything company-hosted I access via a split tunnel VPN. Everything else goes through the normal internet connection, with a company root CA inserted to sniff HTTPS traffic. One of the lucky few I guess :-)

markandrewj 4y ago

This has been my experience with Citrix also, although I have heard it can be set up to work better. Has anyone had experience with HP Anywhere/Teradaci? I am curious how it would compare.

omh 4y ago

[ Disclaimer - I am responsible for a Citrix environment, but I'm reasonably proud of how well it works for our company ] The technology behind remote desktops is fundamentally limited but I'm amazed at how good the user experience can be on a modern well-configured Citrix environment. - The protocol responds well even on low bandwidth as long as latency is OK. On the office LAN it feels like a local computer. - There is offloading for Teams[1], media streams[2] and even entire web browsers[3]. The tech behind this is impressive and it works pretty well (mostly!) - For most staff it's easier to use a thin client or a minimal laptop. - I can keep the Citrix environment patched and managed much more easily than a proliferation of laptops and home devices. It can be a struggle at times and it's definitely not the right fit for developers. But it's got a lot of advantages and most of the time it works amazingly well. [1] https://docs.citrix.com/en-us/citrix-virtual-apps-desktops/multimedia/opt-ms-teams.html https://docs.citrix.com/en-us/citrix-virtual-apps-desktops/m... [2] https://docs.citrix.com/en-us/citrix-virtual-apps-desktops/multimedia/windows-media-redirection.html https://docs.citrix.com/en-us/citrix-virtual-apps-desktops/m... [3] https://docs.citrix.com/en-us/citrix-virtual-apps-desktops/multimedia/browser-content-redirection.html https://docs.citrix.com/en-us/citrix-virtual-apps-desktops/m...

caycep 4y ago

Or healthcare.....

AshamedCaptain 4y ago

You simply get used to it. In many industry sectors (think CPU architects), multiple layers of inception is the norm (crossing multiple operating systems), and it is not strange for a keystroke to take 2 seconds, and for a menu to open and finish rendering in 10 seconds. This "experience" is probably the reason why I can still comfortably work over a DSL link with just network X (even though I still find NX much more comfortable). You really just adapt your way of interacting, and start planning more carefully every one of your actions instead of simply clickety-clacketing everywhere like if you were trying to win a game of Starcraft. It's practically subconscious and it really changes you. I always think it must be much, much worse for blind people. It also reminds me of people who complain that 5-minute build times "impair their productivity". How do you even work on _any_ mid-sized commercial codebase then ? It's not that uncommon for a build to take hours (e.g. games), and in engineering it is also not that uncommon for builds to take _days_ even on powerful server farms.

ilaksh 4y ago
You're a CPU architect and you wait 2 seconds for a keystroke? And you stay in that job? You must be one of the dumbest geniuses I have ever met. That's absolutely ludicrous that anyone would be expected to work that way.
- imtringued 4y ago
  There is a long queue of geniuses waiting for this genius to quit.

AtNightWeCode 4y ago

Worked with Citrix for years at different customers. Think it is more about setup. Server capacity, bandwidth and so on. Often Citrix was used for connecting to a bastion or a jump host. Then an extra hop to the target machine. Some setups were laggy. Some worked just fine.

m463 4y ago

Don't worry, I'm sure that will all be folded into microsoft teams soon :) More seriously, I'm reminded of something a friend always said. You need to have a response time of 1/10 of a second or less for something to be interactive. I remember that but I wonder if the brain fixes it like it ignores your blind spot.

assttoasstmgr 4y ago

Does everyone here just suffer from exceptionally shitty IT departments? I've used Citrix for years and not experienced any of the chronic issues described here. Remember Citrix was developed in the 1990s... the days of Windows NT 3.5/4.0 [1] & Dial-Up connections and to be able to function well in these low bandwidth environments (we're talking kilobits here people, a 10 Mbps LAN was considered glorious at the time). For years ICA was superior to RDP due to its better compression over such connections. It sounds more like whoever setup your environments didn't know what he was doing and the results are what you would expect. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SNJiWPU4HEU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SNJiWPU4HEU

nikau 4y ago
Citrix performance can depend a lot on the apps - older win32 apps work really well as the object caching masked the latency on windows and buttons. Newer apps seem to somehow make the caching not very effective.