Running a fresh install of Windows Server 2016 Remote Desktop server. Initial configuration went smoothly, everyone can log in and access the required application.
The application is a specialized database application from a third party vendor, and has no native network support, their only supported method of sharing the database to multiple workstation is via the terminal server.
We are running into two problems, which may or may not be related. The second issue was discovered while attempting to troubleshoot and diagnose the cause of the first issue. The first issue is that when the users try to print from the database, it appears that the remote desktop freezes up. After considerable time wasted troubleshooting printers, it was determined that in fact the printing was actually successful, and the remote desktop would actually unfreeze if the window was minimized and then maximized.
The problem seems similar to that in the following: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/2978367/remote-desktop-session-freezes-when-you-run-an-application-in-the-sess
The second issue, discovered when troubleshooting the problem, and possibly related, is that once we configured the server to be a remote desktop server, it appears the server is limiting the amount of memory the applications can access. The server is running 12 cores with 32GB of RAM, but applications are showing maxed out and excessive paging with only a couple of hundred megabytes of memory usage. However, the same database application used on a standalone Windows 10 machine is running up to a gigabyte of memory, and performs much better. Doing some internet searches to see if I could find any documentation about this problem, I found several threads about similar issues running database and other memory intensive operations in remote desktop sessions, but no one seemed to have any resolutions.
As far as the first issue, the freezing window while printing, we had considerable difficulty replicating the issue, because when doing admin on the server, I am logging in from a Debian Linux box, and it appears the issue only occurs when logged in locally. So the issue appears to be a graphics rendering issue, possible due to memory constraints.
The question at hand that I am having trouble answering, is what are the mechanisms preventing the applications from accessing the memory, and how do you determine and configure what the limits are? I have read a great deal of Microsoft documentation about remote desktop, to no avail, so I am hoping someone in the community has more information than I do.
