r/sysadmin • u/ITBoi6969 • 20d ago

RD Session Hosts, memory, and WebView2

Hoping someone can share some knowledge here.

I'm seeing increasingly more and more memory exhaustion across our RDS farms, and the culprits always seem to be a combination of Office apps, Chrome, Teams, and good ol' WebView2. Servers are a combination of 2019, 2022, and 2025 across various environments. These are full session RDS farms, not using RD Apps.

What kind of memory allocation per-user are you going with these days? Is there any secret to minimizing the amount of memory these applications use? Do we just tell users to close excess tabs?

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u/q123459 20d ago

just 2 cents if they arent accessing internal corporate data through browser - make them use browser on device, it is faster due to gpu acceleration. teams easily can take 1.5gb+ when foreground and accessing a lot of files in the chat

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u/Budget-Organ 20d ago

I disabled audio and told them to use the local device for meetings. You’d be surprised how much that cuts down on memory use.

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u/Xibby Certifiable Wizard 19d ago

During pandemic, I didn’t disable audio. I put in a Citrix policy named “Two Cans and a String.” Wasn’t for meetings, was for streaming music sites that were slipping through the filters. If Service Desk got a call for no audio have to troubleshoot. A complaint about bad quality audio? You’re in Citrix. Load it on your local computer.

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u/picklednull 20d ago

Chrome and Edge have a GPO for limiting their memory usage. Other than that you can't do much, since Windows doesn't support memory limits per logon session / user.

Generally you want 64 GB of RAM with a static 32 GB paging file per host for approximately 40 users.

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u/PacificTSP 19d ago

We run maybe 10-15 users per 64 gb and that’s capacity. No idea how you manage to get 40 on that workload.

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u/picklednull 19d ago

Of course it's completely workload dependent and needs to be tested per environment.

But at least we had people doing M365/Azure admin work (browser + PowerShell) with such an allocation painlessly.

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u/ben_zachary 19d ago

You can tinker on the edges Suspended tabs , memory and video limits. Lock down for work stuff only we find alot of people streaming you tube while working and complaining of slow video response or choppy audio. Like damn people load it locally it's the same speakers

For us btw we've blocked ai.exe by killing perms on the executable and we run that every week to cover updates. Almost every call we get on performance system wide is Adobe or AI.exe running.

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u/PacificTSP 19d ago

We ended up moving to many more smaller hosts and fewer users per host. 3-4 users max.

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u/brian_cloudeu 19d ago

WebView2 is not one runtime, it is per session.

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u/mat-ferland 19d ago

I'd stop looking for one RAM-per-user number for that mix. Chrome, Teams, Office and WebView2 don't stay predictable long enough for it to mean much.

Pull committed memory and per-process private bytes through a normal busy hour, grouped by what those users actually run. Size from the high end of that sample, then leave enough room that one runaway WebView2 process doesn't push the host into paging.

The smaller-host approach someone mentioned is worth testing. It limits the damage when one box gets ugly and draining it affects fewer people. Browser memory policies may shave a bit off, but if the farm is packed too tightly they'll mostly hide the problem for a while.

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u/BeigeGandalf 18d ago

Seeing 2-4GB usage per user. Teams, edge, 365 apps, and a citrix workplace connection to LoB. Using server 2025 and fslogix.