A Real-World Example of How to Identify the Cause of Poor Performance

June 12, 2020

We recently had a very insightful experience at a customer site.

The customer was a global health service company. They were utilizing Login Enterprise for load testing on all their Windows 10 images.

The hardware they purchased initially was incapable of supporting the number of expected users while maintaining good performance. They noticed that the performance was poor and VSI max was extremely low. They need to find out why. So, they began a discovery process.

Their initial configuration was as follows:

• Base image
• Windows 10 – 1903
• Number of apps – 50 or so
• Elastic layers were used as well

Once they began their discovery, the organization realized is that the filter driver’s contention with their antivirus was causing the problem. It was essentially an antivirus issue. Even without the Elastic layers attached, but with the feature enabled. The filter driver was active, but they were under the assumption that it wasn’t what was causing the issue. What they saw was that when the antivirus was added, the filter driver decreased the performance significantly as the filter drivers were competing for resources.

The health service organization configured the antivirus inside of the base image for exclusions, but due to a bug in the software, the exclusions were not correctly applied. One would have assumed that because the setting was enabled within the antivirus software therefore the effect was applied successfully. However, without testing it can’t be validated that this is the case, and as a result, it would be the wrong assumption that would potentially cost the company millions of dollars.

The senior leadership at Citrix stepped in, took the data, and arrived at a long-term solution and the antivirus vendor had to rewrite the filter driver to honor the exclusion.

Teams were represented by all vendors because difficulties were distinguishing the responsible party. Fortunately, with a scientific measure, we were able to prove the exact cause of the problem. Often, this is a very difficult situation to identify let alone address.

We at Login VSI, especially see this within siloed enterprise customers. Often when Login Enterprise is adopted, it accelerates the organization’s ability to fix problems of such nature.