Remote Desktop Memory Usage

Version 4 of Remote Desktop Commander Almost Ready!

December 14, 2017 By admin Leave a Comment

Hello friends and existing customers! We’re excited to let you know that the release of Remote Desktop Commander v4 is just about ready, and wanted to give you a sneak peak of all of the new features it contains.

We will be releasing Version 4 shortly after the start of the new year, along with a small price increase – our first price increase in over 18 months. If you’d like to test drive a release candidate of version 4, please complete the form here and mention that you want to try the release candidate of Version 4 in your comments.

New Remote Desktop Commander 4 Features

Now You Can Pinpoint Historic CPU, Memory, and Other Session Load Bottlenecks on Servers Instantly With the “Historical Performance and Load Across the Farm” Dashboard

Previous versions of Remote Desktop Commander allowed you to view recent performance metrics across your servers, as well as pull up snapshots of performance for all user sessions given a specific period of time. However, the new Historical Performance And Load Across The Farm Dashboard allows you to scroll through hour-by-hour graphs of when your RDS session host servers were under peak load, in terms of memory, CPU, or session count. The graph is interactive, so you can click on a point of interest, and you will immediately be transported to another dashboard that shows you all of the sessions active in that time frame, so you can review the user session(s) that contributed most to the server load and determine what they were doing at the time.

Historical Performance And Load Across the Farm — Track CPU, Memory, and Session Counts On Your RDS Servers Over Time

Historical Performance And Load Across the Farm (2) — Pinpoint Times of High Resource Utilization on RDS Session Hosts.

Review Which Users Caused High Resource Utilization — After Clicking On a Timeframe of High Resource Utilization, Immediately See Which Users Impacted the Session Host(s) Most.

Quickly Filter Dashboards By Date Range and RDS Collection Name / Server Groups

For organizations with larger RDS deployments, attempting to review all of the session host servers in a single dashboard can get complicated. Version 4 of Remote Desktop Commander allows you to quickly filter dashboards by an 1.) RDS collection name, 2.) a user-defined group of RDS servers, and 3.) in some cases, a date range lookback. By doing so, you can keep multiple dashboards up and running inside the Remote Desktop Commander Client, with one dashboard per RDS collection.

Filter Dashboards By RDS Collections — Limit the Scope of Session Hosts Shown in Dashboards By Filtering By Collection Name or Computer Grouping.

Filtered Dashboard By Computer Group — A Dashboard With Fewer Elements Filtered By RDS Collection Name / Computer Group

Azure and Standard SQL Server Authentication Support

Previous versions of Remote Desktop Commander required use of a local SQL Server deployment with Windows Integrated Authentication. Version 4 now also allows you to use a.) an on-premise SQL server with Standard (explicit username/password) Authentication and/or b.) a Microsoft Azure SQL Server deployment. This provides organizations with the flexibility to create multiple SQL databases for multiple RDS deployments on a single SQL Server, even when each deployment is isolated in a different, non-trusting Windows domain.

Now Use Standard SQL Connections and Azure SQL Connections to Store and Review RDS Data

Other Performance Improvements

In addition to the features listed above, we’ve made many other performance improvements and bug fixes in this version. Stay tuned for our official launch announcement shortly!

Flexible Licensing for RDS Tools

December 14, 2015 By admin Leave a Comment

Years ago, we launched a flexible month-to-month subscription licensing program for our Remote Desktop Commander Suite, and the result was phenomenal. The traditional channel-driven, expensive perpetual licensing models used by our competition were simply making less and less sense.

While occasionally we offer promotions, you can always count on this: We offer month-to-month licensing that starts at less than $10 per RDS/XenApp server per month, and at about a $1 per virtual desktop/physical workstation.

For more details, check out our pricing for Remote Desktop Commander.

RDS Tools for Specific Tasks . . . And Within Reach

Small and medium-sized businesses who run server-based computing farms designed around Microsoft Remote Desktop Services or Citrix XenApp continue to enthusiastically embrace our licensing model, thrilled to finally have reliable tools that cover areas like:

. . . and the little features that help with things like enabling Remote Desktop remotely and the demystification of RDP logs.

All with so little additional cost.

Not sure where to start? Determine what your needs are for RDS tools or Learn more about Remote Desktop Commander Suite and its many features.

Updated: January 2021.

Monitoring Remote Desktop Memory Usage in Real Time With Remote Desktop Commander

June 29, 2015 By admin Leave a Comment

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.

View of process memory consumption by user group — Viewing process memory consumption by grouped user

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.