Poor performance with Office 2003 on Windows 2000 Terminal Service

[Guest]

We're currently running a large Citrix (XPe FR3 SP4) farm delivering a
published Desktop to users. This desktop incorporates Office 2000 which we
are currently looking into upgrading to Office 2003. We've been piloting
Office 2003 for a few users recently and have noticed that the resource
requirements for the suite have changed considerably from the previous
version.

We're running Windows 2000 SP4 on both our pilot and our production systems
and the hardware is identical. What we've noticed is a significant drop in
the amount of sessions that individual servers are able to host (upto 33%
reduction), this is very concerning and is preventing our upgrade/deployment
of Office 2003.

Has anyone else has noticed this issue and found a way around it?
Whilst upgrading from Office 2000 to Office 2003 has anyone else noticed
this issue (with drastically reduced performance using Office 2003 compared
with Office 2000 on Terminal Services)?
Does anyone else run Office 2003 on a Windows 2000 TS platform? If so does
this show similar poor performance issues/performance problems?
Does anyone know if Office 2003 has greater resource requirements in a TS
environment than Office 2000 and specifically why?

The poor performance exhibits itself when you reach a fairly consistent
number of users (much lower than we could support previously with Office
2000) and shows itself with high CPU and high Page File usage/high paging
despite there appearing to be adequate memory available.

We have seen a couple of scalability whitepapers from Citrix and HP.

http://www.citrix.com/site/resources/dynamic/partnerDocs/Office_Scalability_Analysis.pdf

http://h71019.www7.hp.com/activeanswers/Secure/77167-0-0-0-121.html
(registration required)


The Citrix paper suggests user numbers that are much lower than we are
expecting based on our Office 2000 experiences, and the HP paper suggests
better numbers than the Citrix paper, but we can't find any information about
people suffering poor performance or considering these papers to be poor user
numbers.

Any help with this would be really appreciated.

 

[Guest]

Are you disabling the background spellcheck/grammar check and the voice
recognition toolbar (forget the actual name of this toolbar).

 

[Guest]

Yes we have disabled background grammar checking and CTFMON (if that's what
you are meaning - http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=282599) gets disabled
automatically when you install on a terminal server. We have not disabled
background spell checking as it is too much of a requirement and has never
caused problems in the past and is not normally mentioned amongst terminal
server tweaks.