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Virtual desktop performance issues

· 3 min read
Hanz van Aardt
Hanz van Aardt
CEO of Microworks Enterprise, CEO of VoyagerNetz

When running Azure Virtual Desktop (or any other virtual desktop solution for that matter) you are essentially running many users on a single machine. This is great from a resource usage and cost saving point of view ,however, you will most likely run into performance management challenges from time to time. I would like to share a few ideas on how to troubleshoot performance issues.

Identify the main performance bottleneck​

The first step towards fixing the cause of performance problems is to find out what is causing the performance issues. Identify whether your problem is one of the following:

  • CPU
  • Memory
  • Disk I have found that starting with finding these three performance related aspects and identifying the issue is a great place to start. You can use Windows' built in performance monitor and task manager to simply view your CPU % usage, Memory % usage and Disk Queue length during a period of slow performance. I have found it to be fairly simple to identify the main area which is causing a performance bottleneck.

Review individual application usage​

Once you have identified the main area which is under pressure you should check if there is are specific application which is causing the issue. During some of my recent troubleshooting efforts I came across the following scenarios as an example:

  • At one site we picked up that as soon as users log in they open Edge and browse to some pretty performance intensive websites. Yup - even web browsers can be performance hungry at times. For this site we decided to implement the Web View action component in Case Manager and to limit agents' access to certain sites. Naturally this might not always be possible but by first identifying the issue you will be able to work on a plan to resolve it.
  • Another very interesting things which happened recently is that we identified that a Session Host's CPU usage was running at 30% even with no applications open. After analyzing CPU usage in Task Manager it was clear that AppX Deployment Service was causing the problem. I could then start digging through the web for a solution and found this solution page.

Conclusion​

Virtual desktop solutions like Azure Virtual Desktop provide amazing opportunities to run your workloads in the cloud ,however, running multiple users on a single machine can lead to performance bottlenecks. This blog gave a quick overview of some steps you could follow to identify and resolve virtual desktop performance issues.