Is there a way to increase the amount of virtual video ram that terminal services uses

[Rick]

We are hosting an application that uses RSI's IDL at its core over a
Windows 2000 SP4 server running Terminal Services. We are also
running Citrix MetaFrame XP FR3 on the machine. When users open
mutiple plot windows (> 10), they will get backing store errors which
are generated by IDL. We've traced the problem down to what we
believe is a limitation of the amount of virtual video ram that is
available to the IDL application via terminal services. Is there a
way to increase the amount of virtual video memory that is available
to a terminal service session?

Note, we found a microsoft technet article (840342) which seems to
relate to this, however it is Win2003 specific.

Thanks for any help,

Rick...

 

[Alex K. Angelopoulos [MVP]]

I'm not certain whether that key is used on 2000; a related article:
http://support.microsoft.com/?id=126962
indicates that desktop heap size is controlled in a nearby registry key;
note that although the article documents a change between NT 3.1 and NT
3.51, it is listed as applying to Windows 2000 as well.

 

[Rick]

Hi Alex,

I've checked this registry setting in my WinNT 4.0 computer (where the
problem doesn't occur) and the registry entry contains the values
1024, 3072 for SharedSection values, like our Win2000 w/Terminal
Services machine does. However, the Win2000 machine has a 3rd setting
which is 512. This 3rd setting according to technet article 184802 is
the size of the desktop heap for each desktop that is associated with
a "noninteractive" window station. Would applications served through
terminal services/citrix run with this "noninteractive" setting? If
so, I'll try to increase this value and see what results we get.

Thanks,

Rick...

 

[Alex K. Angelopoulos [MVP]]

Hi Alex,

I've checked this registry setting in my WinNT 4.0 computer (where the
problem doesn't occur) and the registry entry contains the values
1024, 3072 for SharedSection values, like our Win2000 w/Terminal
Services machine does. However, the Win2000 machine has a 3rd setting
which is 512. This 3rd setting according to technet article 184802 is
the size of the desktop heap for each desktop that is associated with
a "noninteractive" window station. Would applications served through
terminal services/citrix run with this "noninteractive" setting? If
so, I'll try to increase this value and see what results we get.

I wouldn't think it would use that value, but it _might_ - depending on what
Windows is doing with that allegedly "noninteractive" value. It will be
interesting to see what the effect is. The guly thing here is you along can
replicate the environment, and it takes a change/reboot/log in/try cycle for
each test...