Increase performance over WAN? Alternative to Citrix?

RichardW

We have a central Navision Financials server. Many offices connect to it over a slower WAN network - right now the office just has 2 load balanced T1s. We've run the Performance form and we're only getting back something like 27 packets per second, but if we run that in the local office it's 2700 packets per second. Is that typical?

Any suggestions how to improve the communications between navision client and server? What port do they talk on?

For the slow connections, we're using Citrix but it's getting costly. I'm looking around for some kind of Front-End method for Navision. Is there anyway for the clients to connect to a local Navision server, which then communicates to the central server, so the database stays centralized but the processing/traffic is offloaded? Anyway to compress the communications? Any other way to optomize the client software?

rthsw

navision is allways using very small packets on the xAN, between 400 and 1500 Bytes. So WAN has a lot do to with data-overhead.
you may test to compress the data, the comunication between a 2000RAS server and a 2000 or XP Client speed the comunication up to 3 times in comparision to a Windows 9x-client. but it is still loosy slow.

at least, you should use a terminal-service. Since 2000 uses the technique from citrix very well (till 10 Users per server, 20 will work also, but not so fantastic), you may insert some 2000-server as terminal server. you can conect 4-6 Users in Terminal mode over a european ISDNchannel with 64 Kb.

pcrouse

Realisticly, RDP & ICA connections are about the lowest bandwidth and most secure connections you're going to get. $75 for a TS License + an optional $300 for Citrix is not bad considering you can connect someone w/o having to maintain software on their end, and not have to worry about setting up a VPN to encrypt your data stream.

I know of no lower speed or less expensive connection.

Sorry no good news, but at least it works.