Classic Shell: Forum

Hi,

We're using Classic Shell (4.1.0) in a Citrix XenDesktop environment and it works well except that the start menu sometimes sticks...badly.

Mostly it opens instantly but sometimes (and this seems a little random) there is a pause and you have to wait upto 90 seconds for anything to happen.

I've done some testing this morning and ran a procmon trace on the server I was connected to and noticed that the times it "sticks" explorer.exe is writing to (possibly rebuilding?) the datacache.db file. This is located in my profile which is sitting on a network share.

So :
11:07:12 - CreateFile - DataCache.tmp
...several thousand entries writing the file...
11:08:26 - Close File (this then replaces the .db file I think)

A few minutes later:

11:12:14 - CreateFile - DataCache.tmp
...several thousand entries writing the file...
11:13:19 - Close File

While this file is being written, the start menu is non-functional.

Nothing on my start menu would have changed between those two instances so any ideas why the cache db is being rebuilt? Or is this normal behaviour? How can we tweak?

Thanks.

Classic Shell caches the menu icons inside the DataCache.db and some information related to frequent programs. Every time the menu is closed it saves the entire cache file. Datacache.db is usually always stored locally at %localappdata%\ClassicShell\ directory. In your case you are using XenDesktop and your user profile and thus the AppData folder is redirected so you are experiencing Start Menu slowdowns since your network speed may be slow (not as fast as a local directory anyway).

You could try using a solution like Citrix Profile Management to allow certain folders to be copied to the local system. Or not redirect the appdata folder at all. Also see this article: Citrix Profile Management and VDI – Doing it Right! Appdata redirection is a debatable topic. You can decide after reading the pros and cons: Should AppData be Redirected or Left in the User Profile?

Please report back if you did any changes and if that helped.

_________________
Links to some general topics:

● Compare Start Menus

● Read the Search box usage guide.

I am a Windows enthusiast and helped a little with Classic Shell's testing and usability/UX feedback.

In the latest version 4.2.1 the cache file has been moved from %APPDATA% to %LOCALAPPDATA%, which should always be a local folder.

Thank you both for replying.

The move to a local folder definitely sounds promising - I'm going to be requesting a change to our Citrix image asap.

I appreciate that redirected folders are always going to be slower than local storage and that's going to impact performance but I didn't anticipate it would be this drastic.