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I have a Windows Server with 2 Ethernet ports, both with 1GB cards and I have 20 users connecting to the server to run an application which involves a lot of data being transferred and the speeds are really slow, even though we have 2x 24 port gigabyte switches.

I was just wondering what could be causing the slow speeds, and would it run better if I only used one Ethernet port on the server or could it be the switches? Would linking 2 ports from each switch together improve performance at all?

The server has a 6 core 3.3GHz processor and 8GB of RAM.

Ben Pilbrow
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kevin babb
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  • How many and what kind of drives you have and what RAID? – MadBoy Aug 01 '11 at 18:10
  • 20 users + large datasets + 8GB RAM jumps out as a bottleneck, but you really need to provide more details. What troubleshooting have you done to narrow it to a network problem? – MDMarra Aug 01 '11 at 18:30
  • What's slow, the application or the data transfer? Where to and how is the data being transferred? Have you looked at any perfmon counters, such as disk I/O, memory and CPU utilization, network throughput, etc? – joeqwerty Aug 01 '11 at 18:51
  • the application keeps giving users time-out errors the only performance issue seams to be the hard drive with the os system which has a high disk queue lenth – kevin babb Aug 01 '11 at 20:00

1 Answers1

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How many and what kind of drives you have and what RAID? Have you tried to test the speed just by yourself (with everyone disconnected) if you can copy the file alone with one stream to your computer or to other server?

IF yes what where the results?

Possible problems:

  1. Problem is drives aren't fast enough for a lot of data (especially with a lot of people trying to copy data at same time)
  2. The problem is with NIC's (can be cable, drivers, NIC settings).
MadBoy
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  • the OS is on a sata 2 the storage drives are a raid 5 with sata 3 – kevin babb Aug 01 '11 at 19:57
  • the nics have not got teaming, so i was using the dns with round robin to load balance the network load so could this be the problem? would i be better of with one nic – kevin babb Aug 01 '11 at 20:05
  • How many drives in RAID 5? – MadBoy Aug 01 '11 at 20:06
  • Have you tried to test the speeds yourself as being the only one? – MadBoy Aug 01 '11 at 20:07
  • 3 drives in the raid – kevin babb Aug 01 '11 at 20:09
  • i have not tried the speeds on my own it is used 24/7 – kevin babb Aug 01 '11 at 20:10
  • Also when i reboot the server every workstation has to reboot to see the server again don't know if this has any relevance – kevin babb Aug 01 '11 at 20:12
  • Well that can be it. Depending on amount of data that is requested at one time by many people it can cause problems for drives to deliver what you need. If you can check if the speed is great when you copy things yourself and after more people start joining in it decreases then most likely your drives are the problem. You could change it to RAID 10 if you can have 4 drives which should be better in terms of performance. – MadBoy Aug 01 '11 at 20:12
  • is it easy to change from a raid 5 to 10 with out formating the drives ect – kevin babb Aug 01 '11 at 20:14
  • Plan an outage, do testing of drives. The reboot you mention is different problem and I wouldn't put it in the same question. Start a new one if you want answers and possible resolutions regarding the second problem. – MadBoy Aug 01 '11 at 20:14
  • It's not possible to change RAID's. You would need to copy data (preserving access rights) and then set it up again. Also note that for RAID 10 you need at least 4 drives. – MadBoy Aug 01 '11 at 20:15