When one of our customers recently upgraded a file server from Windows Server 2008 to Server 2012, their customers complained of significantly increased end-of-day processing times—up to three times slower with Server 2012 than the previous system.

The system used terminal services to allow remote administration and running of such tasks as day-end processing. There were no general interactive users. Running the same software on a Windows 8 client system resulted in better performance, all other things being equal (disk, network, CPU, etc.). But a brand new Server 2012 R2 system with just the basic GUI role, performed twice as fast as the Server 2008 system. However, as roles were added, the customer noticed that the RDS role caused the slowdown.

Since Server 2008 R2 was introduced, RDS (Remote Desktop Services, formerly known as Terminal Services) has included a feature called Fairshare CPU Scheduling. With this feature, if more than one user is logged on a system, processing time is limited for a given user based on the number of sessions and their loads (see Remote Desktop Session Host on Microsoft TechNet). This feature is enabled by default and can cause performance problems if more than one user is logged on the system. With Server 2012, two more “fairshare” options were added: Disk Fairshare and Network Fairshare (see What’s New in Remote Desktop Services in Windows Server 2012 on TechNet). These features are enabled by default and can come into play when only one user is logged on. And these options proved to be the cause of the slowdown for our customer. They limited I/O for the single logged-on user (or scheduled task), though the day-end processing was always I/O bound. We were able to remove this bottleneck by either disabling the RDS role or turning off fairshare options.

In summary, if a system is used for file sharing services only (no interactive users), use remote administrative mode and disable the RDS role. If the RDS role must be enabled, consider turning off Disk Fairshare if the server runs disk-intensive software (such as database or I/O-intensive programs), and turn off Network Fairshare if the server has services (such as Microsoft SQL Server or xfServer) to prevent client access from being throttled. For information on turning off Disk Fairshare and Network Fairshare, see Win32 TerminalServiceSetting Class on Microsoft Developer Network (MSDN).

More articles related to this issue:

·         Resource Sharing in Windows Remote Desktop Services
·         Roles, Role Services, and Features