Of all the critical system resources that must be monitored on a Terminal Server or other Server Based Computing environment, memory usage is one of the most important.
If you’ve worked with Citrix or Microsoft RDS for any length of time, you’ve seen how servers can grow unresponsive when an errant process has a memory leak, which is more common then many might think. The RDP Clipboard applet (rdpclip.exe), which runs in each user’s session, is one of the most notorious culprits in this regard.
Which is why we at RDPSoft always found it odd that the Remote Desktop Services Manager (aka TSAdmin) never had an integrated way of showing memory usage by process, by user, by computer, or by session.
Enter Remote Desktop Commander
We decided to fix that in Remote Desktop Commander Lite, our integrated Terminal Server session and process management utility.
Process Memory Consumption
Rather than attempting to get this information from performance counters with WMI, which can be dreadfully slow, we used low-level native calls in a multi-threaded architecture to return memory statistics with blazing fast speed across systems in your farm.
Peak Process Memory Consumption
More than just current memory usage by process, you can also track peak memory usage by process. This is incredibly important, because sometimes a process temporarily allocates a huge chunk of memory, works with it, and then deallocates it.
However, during that peak allocation, if memory is already running near maximum capacity, this can cause a performance impact on your server. And even if the process goes back to “normal memory use,” you can still get a clue as to how greedy it was with memory at a prior moment.
Memory Consumption Per User, Computer, Session, and More . . .
And finally, reviewing memory consumption per user, per computer, or per session is trivially easy.
Simply switch into Process View in Remote Desktop Commander Lite, and then click on the appropriate column (e.g. User, Computer, or Winstation).
Voila. Remote Desktop Commander will automatically tally the total memory for each grouping and display it to you.
How Can You Leverage These Capabilities Today?
Trial software for Remote Desktop Commander Lite is available for free, and you can download it right now.
Questions? Reach out to RDPSoft or comment below.
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