FME Workbench crashes unexpectedly on Citrix

Symptom

FME Workbench is delievered through a Citrix Server and launched using the Citrix Client. After using FME Workbench with an active workspace it may crash unexpectedly when panning or moving bookmarks. Other activities with the interface may also cause crashes.

Cause

Typically Servers where Citrix applications are deployed from do not have a high end or high memory graphics card. The graphics card can become saturated and when this occurs the offending application or applications may crash.

The applications that have traditionally been the source of these issues are typically working images or pictures. GIS applications displaying rasters where there is a lot of refresh occurring between the server and the citrix client due to user panning, can also cause a similar effect.
Citrix has improved the rendering/refreshing of graphics in later releases however it is possible to still encounter problems and FME administrators working with Citrix should be aware of this as a cause.

This can affect all versions of FME Desktop.

Resolution

If you are experiencing issues with FME and Citrix the first thing we suggest is to lower the color depth on the published application to 16bit. This seems to be set by default at a higher value - 24bit or 32bit.

The few reported issues when using FME with Citrix have been resolved by decreasing the color depth.