The Citrix Application Streaming Profiler uses an application installer to create an application profile which contains items such as the application's installed files, its entries into the registry, and miscellaneous organizational data. When an application is published in offline mode, all of this data must be sent to and stored on the client device for the application to run correctly. Except in offline mode, files are not streamed to the client device until they are explicitly requested, which can often save considerable network bandwidth.
Sample Package Sizes
To demonstrate this characteristic, Citrix Engineering profiled, published and launched a number of applications while recording their bandwidth usage statistics in both the online and offline streaming modes. The application installers were configured to completely install application components to the local disk, but were profiled individually (i.e. the profiles only include the specific profiled application and any shared suite components.) The size of the full suite profile is included for reference. Measurements were taken to determine the bandwidth used by the initial launch of the application.
| Application |
Complete Package File Size
(bytes on disk) |
Online Mode Launch
(total bytes transferred) |
Offline Mode Launch
(total bytes transferred) |
Online / Offline |
| Microsoft Office 2003 Suite |
479,380,349 |
N/A |
559,062,000 |
N/A |
| Microsoft Office 2007 Suite |
871,754,526 |
N/A |
1,048,500,000 |
N/A |
| Lotus SmartSuite 9.8 |
102,024,721 |
N/A |
113,010,000 |
N/A |
| Microsoft Excel 2003 |
266,171,887 |
30,591,000 |
286,076,000 |
10.69% |
| Microsoft Outlook 2003 |
424,527,555 |
63,050,000 |
487,315,000 |
12.94% |
| Microsoft PowerPoint 2003 |
409,908,702 |
79,486,000 |
490,420,000 |
16.21% |
| Microsoft Word 2003 |
420,242,792 |
89,887,000 |
505,400,000 |
17.79% |
| Microsoft Excel 2007 |
422,758,891 |
113,135,000 |
526,346,000 |
21.49% |
| Microsoft Outlook 2007 |
421,433,462 |
100,010,000 |
512,320,000 |
19.52% |
| Microsoft PowerPoint 2007 |
425,217,271 |
138,145,000 |
555,445,000 |
24.87% |
| Microsoft Word 2007 |
428,761,394 |
133,180,000 |
543,154,000 |
24.52% |
| Lotus 1-2-3 |
66,008,666 |
14,703,000 |
72,305,000 |
20.33% |
| Lotus Freelance Graphics |
64,098,068 |
17,705,000 |
71,180,000 |
24.87% |
| Lotus WordPro |
57,838,496 |
18,006,000 |
82,539,000 |
21.82% |
Although profiling the applications individually does reduce the size of the offline-mode transfer, the online-mode transfer is still substantially smaller; often 10-20% of the size of the full offline-mode transfer to the client device. More data will be transferred to the client device as the user continues to perform operations with the application in online-mode, but these operations will typically require much less bandwidth - and over a larger period of time - than the initial launching of the application.
Online-mode Comparisons
Individually profiling applications may also reduce the size of the initial online-mode transfer:
| Application |
Single Application Profile
(total bytes transferred) |
Full Suite Profile
(total bytes transferred) |
Single / Full |
| Microsoft Excel 2003 |
30,591,000 |
62,640,000 |
48.84% |
| Microsoft Excel 2007 |
113,135,000 |
132,979,000 |
85.08% |
| Microsoft Word 2003 |
89,887,000 |
74,009,000 |
121.45% |
| Microsoft Word 2007 |
133,180,000 |
163,333,000 |
81.54% |
| Lotus WordPro |
18,006,000 |
17,167,000 |
104.89% |
While this varies based on specific application behaviors, on average, applications have reduced loading times when profiled individually. However, under the current implementation of application streaming, users will only be able to insert and use COM objects exported by other applications if those applications are included in the same profile (for example, inserting an Excel spreadsheet into a Word document,) so the costs of this approach may outweigh the benefits.
In either case, administrators will typically see considerable bandwidth savings by publishing online-mode versions of their application profiles.
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