The one with the slow first logon

Hi there,

I just came across this old entry which never got published...so here it is.

I want to share something with you, something that recently happened to me while deploying a XenApp 6.5 environment; might spare you some valuable time.

As said, I'm deploying at the moment a XenApp 6.5 farm and was presented with a frustrating issue: after a server restart, the first logon via ICA (RDP and console were always fine) was slower than normal. By slower than normal I mean that there was a delay of 30 to 40 seconds during logon. This was visible in both provisioned servers and normal non-provisioned servers. The farm is 6.5 HRP3.
After this first logon/logoff via ICA subsequent logins were fine - loading in the expected amount of time. This was happening to both published applications and published desktops.

Here's a print screen of where the hang was and what was visible on the screen during the hang:

 

To spare you the trouble of reading a long story I'm going to cut to the chase. Running a Process Monitor trace on the first login showed that some Edgesight components where trying to perform what I believe is a CRL check against some servers in Akamai. As the customer has a proxy with authentication the access was failing.

 

The fix came to me when I found a Citrix article explaining how to fix an issue with an Edgesight service. I told myself then that if the trick works for that particular service it should work for the other Edgesight executables - the ones that were giving me a headache.

So what I ended up doing was to create a file called SemsService.exe.config under the folder c:\Program Files (x86)\Citrix\Euem\Service.

A similar file called rscorsvc.exe.config was created under the folder c:\Program Files (x86)\Citrix\System Monitoring\Agent\Core

Both files contain the following text:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<configuration>
<runtime>
<generatePublisherEvidence enabled="false" />
</runtime>
</configuration>

 

...but you probably saw the above lines of config more times than needed.

 

Problem fixed.