Thin Client Performance Issues

Thin Client Performance Issues

A thin client is a locally stored program optimized to establish a local connection with compact devices which has moving parts.  Being a fanless desktop terminal, it has no features that a desktop does have like the memory, sensitive devices and applications. The features are way back in the data centre. The server does utmost of the work like; storing data, launching software programs and doing the calculation. It also provides business owners with essential ways of creating visual desktop infrastructure. Industries with different requirements with common goals do utilize thin clients as they are manageable, secure and cost-effective and has become more used than the regular PCs.

A thin client is a broader computing infrastructure in which many clients share their information or work with a server as it uses cloud computing software. The combination forms a cloud-based system in which desktops resources are compacted at one data centre. This is because the centralization has improved security and software maintenance.

The thin client does consist of clouds access agents and a set of essential local utilities, and some small clients do support older devices like receipt printers because they have parallel portals. It also supports monitor, open portal and keyboard for USB devices. For several years, the thin client has been a reliable device and has gained popularity in many administrations. This has attracted the attention of many researchers and IT personnel for decision support and a better understanding.

It will be a good idea to know how thin client performs to know what to look for when selecting it. let’s look at the performance issues;

1. Amount of data transferred

The data transferred from a client to a computing server based can be used to determine the performance of a thin client. The more the data transfer from a client to a server from a network. The higher the performance of a thin client. Its high performance of data transfer is usually measured with the system.

2. CPU utilization on client and server

The CPU is an essential part that plays a significant role in thin client’s computing. To have proper execution application, the client and server should have enough space. The processing power of clients and server should be utilized to a higher percentage to have high system power.

3. Bandwidth utilization

The bandwidth utilized portion of an application does have an impact on the performance of a thin client. There are factors which do affect the utilization of bandwidth of a network like; the medium access control controlling information transmission, the data information size and the rate of sampling information on devices of the various network.

4. Latency

The amount of time it takes for data to get transferred from one point to the other. The thin client does consume less power as compared to PCs, thus supporting green computing. The thin client does not meet the highly interactive response of usability goal. It will be hard to guarantee a large scale latency by a thin client when needing control of the end to end latency.

When you want to consider the thin client as your visual desktop set-up, it is best if you think its manageability and how it gets to integrate with the existing system. Its performance should be worth the amount you spend on purchasing it. Here is what to consider in the production of thin client; it should have an option which refreshes its screen adequately to deliver a good user experience in regardless of other applications being responsive and having a transparent network. To have a good test of the thin client performance, you should spend a long time with it as your PC. Use it to do your jobs with it and get to know how it feels to work with the visual desktop infrastructure. If you get the urge to go back to your PC, the others will probably want to go back too.

It’s essential to know the remote display protocols that the thin client support; that’s what gets to transfer data from the virtual data desktop to the other endpoint. There are three display protocols; we have the Microsoft’s Remote Desktop Protocol, which is suitable for delivering fast local network on the desktops but doesn’t cope with less reliable and slower networks. It consists of specific hardware requirements and gets to work with windows thin client.

There is the HDX which is suitable for handling high latency networks and low bandwidth. The last is the PColP, which provides access to physical workstations for graphics professions to zero clients. The thin client does support multiple protocols making it easy to transfer data from one environment to another, and the above protocols are usually similar. All you need is being careful when getting a thin client which is cheaper as it has limited protocol support which will, later on, affect the performance of a thin client.

How do you measure thin client performance?

First, know how the thin client system operates. We need to know the two components in a thin client which are; a server application which executes on a remote system and a client application which executes on a user’s desktop. The remote server runs standard server operations, While the client delivers input data across all networks and to the server.  When you want to improve on the remote display performance with limited bandwidth, employ three optimization techniques which are; merging, compressing and caching. With the above techniques, the performance of the thin client user friendly.  The performance should also be judged by how users experience it. It shouldn’t be a hard task to analyze systems using a thin client. This should be analyzed by running a simple benchmark on the system to measure its performance.

The other way of measuring the performance is to instrument the client directly. Insert a tracking mechanism into the thin client system, which will log in into the output and input event display on the client. Some thin clients are sophisticated, making it difficult to measuring them. Getting to monitor the network traffic at the client be an improvement on the server application measurement.