When less is more! Avoiding excessive web content!… I hate hi-res stock photography!

Last week I had a twitter user make comment that implied the reason some of our recent thinwire enhancements have happened is because some of the HDX development and product management team are in the UK! Stefan made this comment

After seeing a fellow tweeter struggling to get a decent mobile signal in central London, supposedly one of the world’s most developed cities!

Twitter sometimes throws up such absolute truths! Just because it is possible to deliver a rich multi-media remote graphics experience it doesn’t mean that:

• You want to pay for the bandwidth to do so
• You have control of or access to a decent network

In many situations you just want certain information as cheaply and fast as possible. Whilst at the top of the range, cutting technologies you can by a Tesla motor, for most of us it’s not affordable and we’re restricted by our mobile provider’s to the networking equivalent of borrowing your mum’s Austin Metro!

Websites are just getting weightier and weightier, with hi-res images, media and adverts. All that content is expensive to remote, it uses bandwidth that slows down your user experience and decoding it on CPU or GPU uses power on your end-point and drains your mobile battery….. and the most annoying thing??? …. Is that the most expensive content….. seems to be that which I have the least interest in!!!…. Grrrr…..

On Wednesday I was stuck on a coach trip in traffic for 3:45hrs out of London on flaky 3G/4G, bored senseless because after a day out my battery had died on my phone and gave up after 30 minutes on the BBC news site. All I wanted to do was read the news (the text), but the pictures and dodgy network made everything a bit slow and jerky (and the BBC is one of the cleanest, ad-free websites – one of the few I could get any content through from while stuck in the middle of the M25 motorway) … and then my phone died anyway. It just emphasised to me how important it is for us to still focus on the worst networks out there! If you are remoting graphics using XenDesktop or XenApp there are a few recent articles you really should read on this topic!

• An awesome article from ProjectVRC, partly undertaken by my Citrix colleague Nick Rintalan. The team have looked at the cost of all that junk on webpages using your bandwidth allowance and battery power and are working on best practice advice as to how you can slash your costs (and improve your temper in my case) with some simple low-cost steps. A must read: Why Web Browsing is Killing VDI Performance and Costing You Big $$$!
• How the HDX team are aspiring to rid me and sys administrators of this nuisance through magic policies designed to outwit excessive users of stock-photography everywhere! In our recent XenDesktop and XenApp 7.6 FP3 release we added a new graphics mode (Thinwire Compatibility) with an option for 16-bit colour and an experimental feature for an 8-bit option that can slash bandwidth by 50%. Read our lead architects overview on the possibilities if you care about bandwidth and responsiveness (or like me get grumpy over hi-res stock photography!):