Performance of SciChart WPF on Remote Desktop / Citrix server

We are considering using SciChart (WPF), but only if its performance is ‘reasonable’ across Remote Desktop / or via Citrix Server. Have you addressed the known problems of using WPF applications across RDP / Citrix? If so, could you provide some stats as to the performance across RDP?

The reason we are asking is that our current software in which we are using our own high speed rendering is doing fine with a lot of data on the local machine, but is not doing so well across RDP. This is not a huge surprise given the known issues of WPF and RDP (for example see https://stackoverflow.com/a/1005739/246758). We may need to deal with this slowness as more of our customers are using Citrix-servers to run our software.

Any feedback on performance of SciChart across RDP / or using Citrix would be much appreciated!

Version

5.1

WPF Performance WPF Remote Desktop Citrix

gordon slysz asked 5 years ago

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Answers (1)

Hi Gordon,

I think this has been asked before, but for your convenience I will do again below.

SciChart render performance will depend on a number of factors including

your hardware
whether DirectX drawing is enabled
the number of series and types of series
the number of data-points
and in some cases the distribution of data-points.

SciChart performance will be entirely unaffected by RDP entirely so long as the remote machine has adequate hardware to run SciChart. For example, running the application without dropping down to software rendering. The bottleneck then becomes streaming the image of the updating chart over the internet.

In order to reduce the load that SciChart places on RDP bandwidth, you can

Limit the frame rate using the SciChartSurface.MaxFrameRate property when in RDP mode
Disable animations on zoom by setting properties such as RubberBandXyZoomModifier.IsAnimated = false, and ZoomExtentsModifier.IsAnimated = false when in RDP mode.

By disabling animations and reducing frame rate, the number of redraws/second will be reduced and this will reduce the load on your internet bandwidth when viewing an application with SciChart over RDP.

Finally we have a number of users that are using SciChart in virtual environments or over RDP. Obviously this is not ideal, the local machine will always perform better but there are no significant blockers why this setup cannot work for you, so long as the chart is correctly configured.

For more info about performance see SciChart Performance Tips and Tricks, How Fast is SciChart’s WPF Chart, and SciChart system requirements.