7 ms·

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 ab

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.
  - Nimitz14 4y ago
    Under 100ms feels immediate. More doesnt.
  - mm007emko 4y ago
    Not my experience. 300ms is noticeable and very annoying. 120ms does not feel instant to me.
  - zasdffaa 4y ago
    That was a bad post. The figure of 300ms was from memory. I guess it's complex but for games shmup games (https://www.pubnub.com/blog/how-fast-is-realtime-human-perception-and-technology/ https://www.pubnub.com/blog/how-fast-is-realtime-human-perce...): " ...for Massive Multiplayer Online Gaming (MMOG), real-time is a requirement. As online gaming matures, players flock to games with more immersive and lifelike experiences. To satisfy this demand, developers now need to produce games with very realistic environments that have very strict data stream latency requirements: 300ms < game is unplayable 150ms < game play degraded 100ms < player performance affected 50ms > target performance 13ms > lower detectable limit " But this is real-time gaming. Typing should be less demanding, I'd think. Edit: also https://stackoverflow.com/questions/536300/what-is-the-shortest-perceivable-application-response-delay https://stackoverflow.com/questions/536300/what-is-the-short...
    - flutas 4y ago
      Just a heads up for others trying to read this, I think the < and > are backwards.
    - eloisant 4y ago
      > Typing should be less demanding, I'd think. Not really, unless you're the kind of guy working in Cobol and who is used to typing with latency. I've seen Cobol developers just ignoring the latency, keeping typing because they know what they've typed and it doesn't matter that it's slow to show up on screen.
      - toast0 4y ago
P5fRxh5kUvp2th 4y ago
I recently had a bit of a rant about security people and how 70% of the truly dumb decisions in our industry can be attributed to them. Your description is exactly why. Security people wedge themselves into the halls of power and then start making decisions that don't actually negatively affect them all that much. I've literally seen a CISO that insisted everyone worked in a way they themselves did not.
- jonfw 4y ago
  sadly, the job of a CISO typically isn't "make the most pragmatic decisions possible to keep our infrastructure secure and running smoothly". In many industries, it's more lke "join as many compliance programs as possible to expand the ability to capture revenue from regulated markets". The CISO didn't make the decision to enforce password rotation- the compliance programs your sales team asked for did
  - P5fRxh5kUvp2th 4y ago
    To your point, password rotation is considered an insecure practice because it causes people to append 1, 2, 3, etc to the same password. But I've seen so many companies that still insist on it.
    - mr_toad 4y ago
      > causes people to append 1, 2, 3, etc to the same password It’s either that or they write them down. Because people are going to forget a password that changes every month, especially a password that has to comply with the complexity rules.
    - selykg 4y ago
      I'm the IT guy for a new non-profit. We aren't separated yet from the company that created us, but we're in the process of separating. I get to decide all this fun stuff. I had a very brief talk with the IT team for the larger parent company when I started and explained this stupid password rotation thing, as I came from a security background, they wanted nothing of it. Set in their ways. For the new non-profit that I'm helping spearhead, I'm not sure I'll get away from the password rotation entirely, but I can certainly set it to something more reasonable, like every 365 days, rather than every 60 days or whatever travesty most are dealing with. I'm pretty pleased about this.
icedchai 4y ago
How long ago was this? 4 megabits would be pretty good... back in 1998!
- marcosdumay 4y ago
  The last time I saw a place migrate the remote offices from a less than 10Mb/s network was around 2015. That same place replaced its mainframe at 2011 because of an enormous price hike.
- acdha 4y ago
  This _very_ much depended on where you are. I had symmetric 10Mbps at home in 1998 but when we moved to New Haven in 2008 Verizon couldn't deliver more than ISDN / T1 to large chunks the city (we literally could have used a WiFi antenna to hit their regional headquarters, too). There's so much deferred maintenance around the world.
  - icedchai 4y ago
    True, true! I had a 3 megabit cable modem at home, back in 1998 (3 megabits down, 128kbits up, if I recall.) My office at the time had dual T1's... a little over 3 megabits shared with roughly 500 people.
- jiggawatts 4y ago
  2017
dboreham 4y ago
I've never used Citrix but I remember when I had a T-1 (1.54Mbits for the younglings) and I left a Remote Desktop session open on a laptop. Some days later I went back to the laptop and used it for an hour before I realized I was in a RDP session to a machine in another state. I wonder what Citrix screwed up to make their UX so different. Of course a decent T-1 back then probably had better latency than today's consumer HFC connection.
- sgerenser 4y ago
  Yeah the T1 easily had enough bandwidth to smoothly send the 800x600 16 bit color desktop you were probably running at the time (guessing the timeframe based on usage of a T1). Frame to frame diff was probably much easier as well with less shadows and graphical effects that modern Windows or Linux DEs have. I don’t doubt Citrix has gotten worse as well but the job it had to do back then was much easier.
alpentmil 4y ago
> Don't blame Citrix. Blame the bastard in the head office that doesn't give a f%@$ about anyone not him. > 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. If you were sure about this you could have as the consultant told this sentence or made this entire comment as your 'first page' of powerpoint/PDF (to make sure other hn-ers are happy!)

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.
- Nimitz14 4y ago
  Under 100ms feels immediate. More doesnt.
- mm007emko 4y ago
  Not my experience. 300ms is noticeable and very annoying. 120ms does not feel instant to me.
- zasdffaa 4y ago
  That was a bad post. The figure of 300ms was from memory. I guess it's complex but for games shmup games (https://www.pubnub.com/blog/how-fast-is-realtime-human-perception-and-technology/ https://www.pubnub.com/blog/how-fast-is-realtime-human-perce...): " ...for Massive Multiplayer Online Gaming (MMOG), real-time is a requirement. As online gaming matures, players flock to games with more immersive and lifelike experiences. To satisfy this demand, developers now need to produce games with very realistic environments that have very strict data stream latency requirements: 300ms < game is unplayable 150ms < game play degraded 100ms < player performance affected 50ms > target performance 13ms > lower detectable limit " But this is real-time gaming. Typing should be less demanding, I'd think. Edit: also https://stackoverflow.com/questions/536300/what-is-the-shortest-perceivable-application-response-delay https://stackoverflow.com/questions/536300/what-is-the-short...
  - flutas 4y ago
    Just a heads up for others trying to read this, I think the < and > are backwards.
  - eloisant 4y ago
    > Typing should be less demanding, I'd think. Not really, unless you're the kind of guy working in Cobol and who is used to typing with latency. I've seen Cobol developers just ignoring the latency, keeping typing because they know what they've typed and it doesn't matter that it's slow to show up on screen.
    - toast0 4y ago

P5fRxh5kUvp2th 4y ago

I recently had a bit of a rant about security people and how 70% of the truly dumb decisions in our industry can be attributed to them. Your description is exactly why. Security people wedge themselves into the halls of power and then start making decisions that don't actually negatively affect them all that much. I've literally seen a CISO that insisted everyone worked in a way they themselves did not.

jonfw 4y ago
sadly, the job of a CISO typically isn't "make the most pragmatic decisions possible to keep our infrastructure secure and running smoothly". In many industries, it's more lke "join as many compliance programs as possible to expand the ability to capture revenue from regulated markets". The CISO didn't make the decision to enforce password rotation- the compliance programs your sales team asked for did
- P5fRxh5kUvp2th 4y ago
  To your point, password rotation is considered an insecure practice because it causes people to append 1, 2, 3, etc to the same password. But I've seen so many companies that still insist on it.
  - mr_toad 4y ago
    > causes people to append 1, 2, 3, etc to the same password It’s either that or they write them down. Because people are going to forget a password that changes every month, especially a password that has to comply with the complexity rules.
  - selykg 4y ago
    I'm the IT guy for a new non-profit. We aren't separated yet from the company that created us, but we're in the process of separating. I get to decide all this fun stuff. I had a very brief talk with the IT team for the larger parent company when I started and explained this stupid password rotation thing, as I came from a security background, they wanted nothing of it. Set in their ways. For the new non-profit that I'm helping spearhead, I'm not sure I'll get away from the password rotation entirely, but I can certainly set it to something more reasonable, like every 365 days, rather than every 60 days or whatever travesty most are dealing with. I'm pretty pleased about this.

icedchai 4y ago

How long ago was this? 4 megabits would be pretty good... back in 1998!

marcosdumay 4y ago
The last time I saw a place migrate the remote offices from a less than 10Mb/s network was around 2015. That same place replaced its mainframe at 2011 because of an enormous price hike.
acdha 4y ago
This _very_ much depended on where you are. I had symmetric 10Mbps at home in 1998 but when we moved to New Haven in 2008 Verizon couldn't deliver more than ISDN / T1 to large chunks the city (we literally could have used a WiFi antenna to hit their regional headquarters, too). There's so much deferred maintenance around the world.
- icedchai 4y ago
  True, true! I had a 3 megabit cable modem at home, back in 1998 (3 megabits down, 128kbits up, if I recall.) My office at the time had dual T1's... a little over 3 megabits shared with roughly 500 people.
jiggawatts 4y ago
2017

dboreham 4y ago

I've never used Citrix but I remember when I had a T-1 (1.54Mbits for the younglings) and I left a Remote Desktop session open on a laptop. Some days later I went back to the laptop and used it for an hour before I realized I was in a RDP session to a machine in another state. I wonder what Citrix screwed up to make their UX so different. Of course a decent T-1 back then probably had better latency than today's consumer HFC connection.

sgerenser 4y ago
Yeah the T1 easily had enough bandwidth to smoothly send the 800x600 16 bit color desktop you were probably running at the time (guessing the timeframe based on usage of a T1). Frame to frame diff was probably much easier as well with less shadows and graphical effects that modern Windows or Linux DEs have. I don’t doubt Citrix has gotten worse as well but the job it had to do back then was much easier.

alpentmil 4y ago

> Don't blame Citrix. Blame the bastard in the head office that doesn't give a f%@$ about anyone not him. > 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. If you were sure about this you could have as the consultant told this sentence or made this entire comment as your 'first page' of powerpoint/PDF (to make sure other hn-ers are happy!)