Using Citrix Stress Printers

In this document we will see how to use Citrix Stress Printers to test a Citrix environment with multiple printers. We will use a Citrix tool called Stress Printers, with this utility we will be able to simulate the load that a server experiences when creating printers on user logon. We will be able to configure how many printers we want it to create for us (simulating a user logon), the time we want it to wait before deleting them (simulating a user logoff) and how many times we want it to repeat this process. This is a process that should be carried out on Citrix Presentation Server or Citrix XenApp.

The first step is to get the utility, for this we can download it from HERE, or from the official Citrix website HERE.

GOOD, We run the application StressPrinters.exe and it will show us the installed printers. We must keep checked the printers we are interested in testing, and by clicking on each one we can configure certain parameters. The important thing is to mark how many printers we want it to show us to create for each of them (The number of concurrent add events”) simulating the user's login; we will also indicate the time we want it to wait between creating the printers and deleting them, to simulate the user logging out (Maximum delay between add and delete (in milliseconds)’). We will also be able to specify how many times we want this process to repeat to put more load on the server.. To run our setup we will press the button “Run”,

… we wait while the process runs…

GOOD, the process has already finished, now it is time to review and draw conclusions. Accept.

If we press the button “Save log” it will save a LOG in text format with all the details of each printer, the important thing is the time it takes to generate them. We can observe that certain printers take little time to generate them 4 sometimes it takes a short time and other times quite a bit. This can be improved by changing the printer driver, print queues…