Horizon Client and 'degraded performance' on client Win10 x64 PC

[kveldulv001]

Hi,

I am new to this community and could not find a similar problem on this forum.

I am running VMWare Horizon 4.9 client on my home Win10 x64 PC for remote access to my corporate VDI. Some time ago (back on v.4.8) I started to observe 'degraded PC performance' - my home PC's performance, not the VDI I was connecting to.

Such 'degraded performance' only reproduces when I have active Horizon session running, the moment I 'disconnect' via Horizon client the problem disappears. Nothing in my home PC's  task manager (CPU, memory, disk, network etc. ) would indicate spikes that could help explain this. In the past,  disconnecting in Horizon client and then restarting my home PC would solve this for some time  but not anymore.

By 'degraded performance' I am referring to items like lags when using mouse buttons, slower-than-usual Chrome response (when switching tabs or opening new ones) , video stuttering in sites like YouTube or dropped FPS (frames per second) in video games such as StarCraft II when tested.

I contacted my company's IT support but they could not advise on anything similar and suggested uninstallling Horizon client, deleting any leftover %appdata% and C:\ VMware folders and  then installing  the 4.9 version again. There was no change.

Any ideas or suggestions on this would be most welcome.

[BenFB]

Try turning off H.264 decoding in the Horizon Client preferences. You GPU might be struggling to keep up.

[kveldulv001]

hi,

Thank you for the suggestion. I disabled that setting and will do more testing. I have a GPU decent for typical consumer workloads (AMD RX 480 chipset) but let's hope it will do  the trick.

[BenFB]

Depending on the outcome I would verify BIOS/firmware/drivers are current on the machine with the Horizon Client installed.

[kveldulv001]

hi, there's no change after turning off / on h.264 settings so I will play with BIOS update.

[kveldulv001]

...after flashing most recent BIOS version (MSI B350 motherboard) there's no change

[BenFB]

I would suggest watching a process monitor in the machine with the Horizon Client and the machine with the Horizon Agent while you experience the issue to see where the problem is.

[kveldulv001]

hi,

thanks for the tip and interestingly enough,  I've taken snaphots on my home PC i..e where Horizon client was running. I have 16G RAM total:

- Screen 1

- 85% RAM usage on the average where Horizon client sitting at 400-500MB  Next process was only 30.5MB RAM -> I have no idea what contributed to this 85% usage (out of 16G in total)

- closing Horizon client did not change this 85% oveall memory usage and PC performance. So this goes contrary to my initial findings that closing Horizon session always helps.

- Screen 2 -

- after the reboot I am back to typical 13% memory usage in when PC is 'idling'.

- when launching another Horizon session my PC performance drops again, as usual, but memory usage does not spike (for the moment).

So it seems some process (?) not listed in the resource manager (?)  can drive up memory  usage to 85% (out of 16G) however I am observing degraded performance with <30% memory usage just the same.

[BenFB]

I'm also interested in what the VM that you are connecting to looks like. I've seen where the PCoIP or Blast worker process can have high utilization and result in lag.

Can you temporarily try disabling your A/V and see if things improve. We've seen A/V on a few occasions mess with Horizon connections.

[kveldulv001]

VM I am connecting to is an end user Win7 ENT SP1 coporate (i.e. custom) PC build, where I don't have admin rights to run all services etc. However I haven't observed similar performance issue on the VM side. Not to sure what to look for beyond the resource manager.

Then, what do you mean by temporarily disabling A/V ? If you are referring to disabling actual graphics on my home PC then I am not able to do that. My Ryzen AMD build does not have built-in GPU / graphics so I cannot disable the standalone GPU.

[BenFB]

I'm referring to Anti-Virus, it looks like you have AVG?

[kveldulv001]

hi, I am not observing any difference with AVG off / on. I have a basic  version, not all modules enabled. Will run this setup with AVG off / on  for more time to tell for  sure

[roberdaniel]

Hello all.

I'm facing the same issue in 2023 with Horizon Client 8.8.1

I could identify a pattern, Horizon client go crazy eating ram when you play multimedia on VDI, for example when you open some video or Zoom session on remote side, then you will notice how the subprocess called Vmware Horizon View Client starts eating a lot of memory, and in a certain point it starts to create a dump file.
The writing in this dump file is so high (even having SSD) that slow a crawl the pc.
%appdata%\local\VMware\VDM\dumps 

PCoIP or Blast, no difference.

So, the only workaround at the moment is to not to open any video or multimedia on VDI side.

Is VMWare aware of this behavior?

[dcacortes]

Hi @roberdaniel 

Facing the same behavior with my VDI connection, but didn't realize it could be playing any media stream/file. For my part, it happens without doing this action, but the same results. The local machine starts creating a DUMP file at C:\Users\***UserPath***\AppData\Local\VMware\VDM\Dumps and it's already a nightmare to use the local machine. I need to exit the VMware Horizon Client process and restart over.

So please, if you or someone knows any solution to avoid this problem (better to solve it), well appreciate :0)