Squeak on Citrix?

Peter Crowther peter at ozzard.org
Wed Nov 19 00:05:39 UTC 2003


> From: [...] Darius
> How well does Citrix or TightVNC play sound, MPEG animations, and/or 3D
> graphics?

Just to introduce myself, I'm a Citrix Certified Administrator [woo] and
ex-trainer [so?], who's been dealing with WinFrame and Terminal Server /
MetaFrame since WinFrame 1.6 [ah, that's more useful :-)] and has managed a
network of them in production.

TightVNC won't do what you want.  It's a remote-control protocol for seizing
control of an existing screen.  You'll need Windows Terminal Server (WTS),
with or without Citrix Metaframe on top, to get multiple virtual sessions
from one computer.

Sound is OK, but network-intensive, across ICA (Citrix' protocol).  You can
choose the quality of the link.  It's not so hot on RDP (the Microsoft
protocol).

MPEG animations are possible but *very* intensive.  Don't expect to get more
than one student playing one at a time unless you like gigabit Ethernet,
very powerful servers and powerful clients - it's actually more
resource-intensive to do this across ICA or RDP than to play it directly on
the client.  The same goes for 3D graphics: you could use a software
renderer (hardware acceleration doesn't work for this), but you'd better
have beefy computers.

> I'm interested from the point of students using it in school.
> That environment would/should be multimedia intensive.

If you have good enough clients to handle the multimedia, you'd almost
certainly be better running locally, I'm sorry to say.  Because ICA and RDP
are general display/sound protocols, they just don't have the
special-purpose optimisations that the native MPEG players, sound systems
and 3D acceleration have, so they hammer client, server and network.

The exceptions to this are (a) if you are concerned about security or (b) if
you have one kind of client and wish to run a Windows 2000 desktop on them -
for example, one school I know has kept its Acorn Archimedes machines in the
classrooms, and put in a couple of WTS/Metaframe servers.  It works pretty
well for typical 'business' applications.

Sorry for the negative view, but I don't think it's going to do what you
want.  I can run some benchmarks on one of my tame WTS systems if you send
me a more precise description of your requirements.

		- Peter




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