Citrix XenApp / XenDesktop Logon Slow or Delay – Please Wait for the User Profile Service
Applies to:-
- Windows Server 2008 R2, 2012 R2, 2016
- Citrix XenApp 6.5, 7.x
- Citrix UPM
- Roaming Profiles
- Folder Redirections or Remote Home Directory
The Problem
When you log on to a Published Desktop, there is a delay while the screen displays “Please wait for the User Profile Service”. If you open Citrix Director from your Delivery Controller and look at “Profile Load” for your recent connections, you will see metrics relating to specific timings for different elements of logon.
The thing to look out for is the (fairly) obviously incriminating Profile Load timer. This is always at least 30 seconds – hmm, looks like some kind of timeout to me.
Upon further investigation and a lot of trawling through documentation, I found that the problem was that the logon process was waiting 30 seconds to validate that the network was available. Luckily this is a very easy fix and (in my case) saved me over 50% of logon delay.
The Fix
- Open Group Policy Management from a Domain Controller or a Server with AD Tools installed.
- Create a new policy (or edit your existing one). I’m assuming as you’re using Citrix you have some GPO’s already configured – just edit the one that relates to Computer Configuration (or the one that you have scoped to include your VDA’s).
- Open the following locations:-
- Computer Configuration / Administrative Templates / System / User Profiles / Set maximum wait time for the network if a user has a roaming user profile or remote home directory
- Set to Enabled.
- Change Wait for network for maximum (seconds) to 0 (zero).
- See screenshot below (just make sure the settings match).
- Close the Editor
- Run Group Policy Update or from each VDA run GPUPDATE /FORCE
That’s it – try logging off and logging on and either time it with your normal stop watch method or look at the statistics in Citrix Director. As you can see from my timings below, the logon time improvements are significant!
Hope this helps someone.
