Scalability of Office Suites on Terminal Servers

Posted by Benny Tritsch on May 10, 2007

[Introduction] [Methodology] [Performing the Test] [Measurements] [Results] [Conclusions]
[Appendix 1: Configuration Details] [Appendix 2: Step-by-Step Description]

Appendix 1: Configuration Details

Configuration of the Servers

Necessary modifications to the pre-installed basic system at the Microsoft MTC Lab:

 

Option	Description
Bginfo	Removal of Bginfo.exe from Documents and Settings\All Users\Start Menu\Programs\Startup
Screen saver	Deactivate per local policy (in Gpedit.msc) under Local Computer Policy | User Configuration | Administrative Templates | Control Panel | Display | Screen Saver
Required tools	The following tools and files must be located under C:\ on the server: Pslist.exe, Sleep.exe and TS_Test.htm
Logon script	Copy the logon script to \Documents and Settings \All Users \Start Menu \Programs \Startup\
Documents	Copy the documents to C:\Install \Documents\

 

"Tuning" Microsoft Office 2007 for the Test

Microsoft Office Ultimate 2007, installed at the beginning of the test, required increasing possessor resources as the number of user sessions increased, whereas Office 2003 and OpenOffice.org 2.1 did not. This difference was clear even on the 64-bit platform, whereby at the end of the test with Office Ultimate 2007, the fully occupied processor resources did not allow any more users to log on to the system.

The new process GrooveMonit.exe, which was loaded for each user session, contributed to the memory load. Directly after its activation, it occupied 5.7 MB, later occupying a typical 2.6 MB. This occupied an additional 250 MB of memory on the total system.

In order to guarantee comparisons with other office suites (Microsoft Office 2003 and OpenOffice.org 2.1), Office Professional Plus 2007 (without Groove 2007) was used during the actual test. It was additionally necessary to ensure that the menu button for the office applications in the upper left corner no longer blinked. This was achieved by setting the registry key OfficeMenuDiscovered under HKCU \SOFTWARE \Microsoft \Office \12.0 \Common \General to the value DWORD:1.

The following images display the differences for processor loads during the respective test runs:

• MSO 2007 (1): Microsoft Office Ultimate 2007.
• MSO 2007 (2): Microsoft Office Professional Plus 2007 without setting the registry key OfficeMenuDiscovered to DWORD: 1.
• MSO 2007 (2-SP2): Microsoft Office Professional Plus 2007 without setting the registry key OfficeMenuDiscovered to DWORD: 1. Use of Windows Server 2003 SP2.
• MSO 2007: Microsoft Office Professional Plus 2007 with setting the registry key OfficeMenuDiscovered to DWORD: 1.

 

 

The variant referred to as MSO 2007 in the images above was used throughtout all tests, both on the 32-bit and the 64-bit platforms.

 

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