Understanding And Troubleshooting Context Switches

Tuesday, 14 November 2006 by Michel Roth

Thomas Koetzing has written an excellent article on the subject of Context switches in Terminal Server environments. This is a good thing because people have the tendancy to rule out Context Switches when troubleshooting performance issues when in fact they can pose quite a bottleneck sometimes.

"Ever heard of "context switches"? If yes, then you are probably an Administrator for a Citrix Presentation Server farm. Now this is not a Citrix related problem but the context switches are one of the default performance counters in the Citrix Resource Manager and obviously the most often raised alert. Other systems might also have issues with the context switches but if there isn't an alerting monitor you will never know."

"If the performance counter shows high context switches, it means that threads have less time to do their work and the system performance might go down. At that time the Citrix Resource Manager or any other monitor will raise an alert to inform the Administrator that something is wrong."

Read the article here.