PCoIP vs Blast Extreme comparison

Marius Sandbu has done an initial comparison of PCoIP and the new Horizon 7 BlastExtreme to see how they compare in terms of user experience, bandwidth usage, RAM and CPU usage.

The tests includes the following user workload;

• · Logging in and waiting 1 minute for the uberagent to gather data and getting the session up and ready.
• · Open a PDF file, scrolling up and down for 1 minute. (The PDF is located locally on the VM to exclude network I/O)
• · Connect to a webpage http://www.vg.no, which is a Norwegian newspaper which contains a lot of different objects and high graphics, and scrolling up and down for a 1 minute.
• · We then open Microsoft Word and type randomly for 1 minute.
• · Last but not least our favorite opening of Captain America Civil War trailer in fullscreen using Chrome for the full duration of 2 minutes.

This allows us to see which workloads generate how much bandwidth, CPU- and RAM usage with each of the different protocols.

To collect and analyze the data we were using the following tools

· Splunk – Uberagent (Get info we didn’t even think was possible!)

· Netbalancer (Show bandwidth, set packet loss, define bandwidth limits and define latency)

Blast Extreme

First test (5 MS latency, no packet loss) Blast Extreme

Bandwidth usage (248 MB total, Maximum usage 1,6 MBPS)

CPU Usage (Splunk, UberAgent) VMBlastW.exe (About 8.2%)

RAM Usage , Average Usage

RAM, Maximum Usage

PcoIP

Now the interesting thing about PCoIP is that is consistently packet sizes of 1198 bytes (It never beyond that point and it looks like it tries to buffer packets before it comes up to that byte size before it sends it across the wire.

First test (5 MS latency, no packet loss) PCoIP

Bandwidth usage (184 MB total, Maximum usage 999 KBPS)

CPU Usage (Splunk, UberAgent) PCoIP (About 24.2%)

RAM Usage , Average Usage

RAM, Maximum Usage

Conclusion of test 1: Blast Extreme had a much better user experience, and also uses a lot LESS resources on the endpoint. Note however that Blast Extreme uses more bandwidth, this can be because of TCP to adjust for packet loss, but I think that Blast Extreme does some initial tests to ensure of bandwidth capacity and tries to maximize the bandwidth based upon what it has available. This clearly showed on the Youtube clip where Blast Extreme delivered a nearly crips perfect picture the entire session.

So let’s do a test with some added latency so see how they compare.

Blast Extreme 200 MS

First test (200 MS latency, no packet loss) Blast Extreme

(Bandwith usage 43 MBPS, Maximum bandwidth 201 KBPS) Latency has a really bad effect on TCP, which is similar to when to do testing on ThinWire on Citrix. But I can see from Wireshark that the packet lenght is also fixed at a rate, but it uses smaller packets whenever the buffer is low or empty

But during the YouTube part is tries to maximize the byte size in the packet.

CPU Average ( and again, CPU average is pretty low)

Memory maximum (Same goes for memory)

PCoIP 200 MS

First test (200 MS latency, no packet loss) PCoIP

(Bandwidth usage 118 MB, Maximum bandwidth 689 KBPS)

CPU Average (Looks like it does some measure of the bandwidth usage and it then causes the CPU to do alot less on the endpoint.

RAM Usage is about the same

Source and more: https://msandbu.wordpress.com/2016/03/29/remote-protocols-benchmarking-citrix-vmware-and-rdppart-one-pcoip-vs-blast-extreme/