Stupid Citrix Trick #4: Profile Bloat and INetCache

Problem: User profiles are unusually large.  Logons and logoffs are taking an extremely long time, and disk space is running low in the network share where profiles are saved.

Solution: Almost every user with a Citrix profile will have a folder in that profile called INETCACHE.  Based on the name alone, what would you expect that folder to do?  Cache internet files, right?  And that's exactly what it does, but unfortunately there's more to the story.

First of all, that's not the folder where Internet Explorer files are cached.  They are actually cached in a subfolder, INetCache\IE.  It's the IE folder that gets bloated and cause issues. There's another good reason for putting in in its own subfolder: the INetCache folder contains quite a bit of stuff besides cached Internet Explorer files.

I don't know if it's this was for all Office versions, but I do know that Office 2010 and Office 2013 also store cached resources in the INetCache folder, each in as separate subfolder.  Not only that but Office does not like it one bit if you delete those folders.  It will complain about it without doing anything useful, such as automatically recreating them at application launch.  If they do get deleted you'll have to recreate them manually or reset the user's profile.

So how to limit bloat without affecting Office or other apps that use that folder.  Naturally, Citrix has you covered.

In the Profile section of XenApp 7 policies there are a lot of settings for user profiles, from the most basic, such as the path to the profile share and the names of the user folders, to such things as... folder inclusion and exclusion policies.

First, here is the exclusion policy to make sure that INetCache is included in the user's profile:

(Profile paths are always relative to the root of the user's profile, natch.)

So that setting will include the entire INetCache folder.  Great!  Well, sorta.  We don't want to include the IE folder.  Remember the catchphrase "There's an app for that!"  You guessed it: there's a setting for that!  And here it is:

Yes it's JUST THAT SIMPLE.  You can explicitly exclude subfolder of folders you have already explicitly included.  Apply these two policies and your profile woes are over.

But Graham (you say), we still have all these bloated folders on disk.  Is there any way we can clean out the IE folder that's already there?  I'm glad you asked!  This is Citrix, of course there's a way.

May I present to you the Logon Exclusion Policy.

As you can see we have selected to delete excluded files and folders from the user's profile.  Once we apply the two policies above, this policy will delete the files in the IE folder (and any other excluded folders).  The other values for this setting are to synchronize the excluded files and folders with the user's profile, or to ignore the files.

Disinfecting your profiles this way reduce disk usage and improve logon performance, which should keep both IT and your end users happy.