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Our company develops a Winforms based desktop application that we host on our servers. Our customers use our software via RDP. A question was recently asked if the client's internet connection could be causing a performance issue at the server. To clarify, the claim is that an operation that happens in our application that only involves our on premise SQL server takes longer when the RDP client's connection is slower. Not perceived slower, but actually slower. My initial response is absolutely not but two senior developers have indicated they've seen several situations where they couldn't rule out that something to this effect was happening. None of us think it makes any sense but I'm asking this question to rule the possibility out. The only scenario I can think of where it seems this could make any sense is if the server is waiting on some input from the client side and the internet connection is delaying that.

So just to restate: Is it possible for the internet connection performance on the client side of an RDP connect to have any real (not perceived) affect on the performance of an application running on a server?

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I've certainly seen problems with apps on RDP servers and network connected apps.

In a previous job (so no logs I'm afraid) we set up a Server 2008 terminal server runnning the SITS (Student Records System) client. Briefly the SITS client is little more than a shortcut to a share holding the actual client o the server. This allowed for easy and global changes and was the manufacturers recommended method.

On the network (including 100Mb WAN connections to remote sites) performace was perfectly acceptible with approximately a 5 second delay from Launch to App. We put the same shortcut on the RDS server and load time was over 35 seconds. Our fix which I don't belive you can really apply was to copy a local copy from the SITS server to the RDS server's local disk and keep it in siyn with an overnight sync job. Perfomance then went back to close to the expected behaviour.

We didn't really get to the bottom of what the cause was other than network connection. My guess is that the RDS Server apportions bandwidth to clients and client apps and this limited the capacity of the RDS session to grab the app from the SITS share. Given time I suspect digging into the network config may have revealed prioritisation of some sort.

The two servers were in the same VM cluster (though on different blades) with I recall a 10Gb backplane.

I suspect the issue is the RDS is limiting the rate that SQL calls can talk to te SQL server from RDS in a similar way.

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  • Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think your scenario is a little different. It seems that in your case putting the application/shortcut on the RDS server caused the performance hit. In our case we always access our application via RDP, even when we use it within our company.
    – Crob
    Jun 27, 2019 at 13:05
  • Yes - it was, however my point which I failed to make properly was that I suspect your app running on the server is being limited on the SQL calls by the same mechanism stopping our app loading itself from the SITS server.
    – Peter Hurst
    Jun 27, 2019 at 14:05

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