I was asked the other day how does Citrix improve response times. The simple answer is that it cuts down on the number of times the user has to wait for information to be transfered across the network. For example the diagram below shows an application on a client PC communicating with the DB. In this case it is Oracle forms 6i and this can take between 20-60 network hops to get the data needed to display a screen.
If you are on the same LAN as the DB then you may not notice the delay but it you access across a WAN then the time to cross the WAN all adds up to a slow response time.
With Citrix the citrix server is placed in the datacentre close to the DB. The client then makes one request to the citrix server, the citrix server makes all the requests to the DB and then when the screen is complete send a picture of the screen back to the user. As can be seen in the diagram below.
As the citrix server and DB are closely located then the network hops needed to get the data to build the screen happen quickly and the user has to suffer the delay across the WAN only once. Where applications cross the WAN many times and the delay from the users to the server is high then Citrix is likely to help improve performance. However, you need to also consider the bandwidth of the pipe between the client and the server.
To do this you can create a performance model. The following presentation contain I performance model I built for determining when to deploy citrix to various locations as part of a large upgrade project. In that project the application made 7 trips across the network to generate the display for the user. Pages 12-21 provide the model and some results.
You can download the presentation here.
1202Performance 