Comments on: Network speed issues

By: jpagel

jpagel — Sat, 06 Nov 2004 18:32:53 +0000

are all your nodes OS’s up to date? do you have all them with virus protection? you said you saw trillions of packets coming from the machines, possibly you have a few nodes that have a virus that is plugging the network, bandwidth then increases when these nodes are shut down, i could see that since you are on a gbps network it would not plug the network, just slow it down…also i disagree with having more than one server, as long as the one that you have is powerful enough to handle all operations of 50 nodes (ex. dual xeons, or dual opertons) at that point it could handle all the network functions fine..

By: jpagel

jpagel — Sat, 06 Nov 2004 18:31:11 +0000

By: critiq

critiq — Sat, 06 Nov 2004 12:46:39 +0000

tmc24: The XP issue is solved later on in SP2

By: scottbr

scottbr — Fri, 05 Nov 2004 16:07:08 +0000

tmac24, do you have a KB article/link to the known problem you mention?

Here is another possiblility-
http://www.smallbizserver.net/DesktopDefault.aspx?tabid=98

By: tmac24

tmac24 — Fri, 05 Nov 2004 13:32:52 +0000

Are you using windowsXP workstations. We had a similiar issue. After all of the network monitoring it ended being a know issue with xp browsing netowrk resources.

By: bobkberg

bobkberg — Fri, 05 Nov 2004 13:30:50 +0000

A couple of other things come to mind.

If your network changed over to Windows from NetWare – are there ANY Novell software components left running?
What protocols are you running – IP only, or any IPX.

Also – have you used a sniffer (Ethereal is free) to see what the network traffic looks like at the slowdown times?

Bob

By: attamiller

attamiller — Fri, 05 Nov 2004 12:17:47 +0000

I agree with NTManager. It is not advisable to run a file server and domain controller on the same machine. We ran into the same problem at one of our remote sites. We installed a separate server for file sharing and the speed throughout the network increased.

By: arrghoff2pillage

arrghoff2pillage — Fri, 05 Nov 2004 12:12:10 +0000

These can be very hard to trace. First and most important question:has anything changed before you saw this slowdown?. If so, look at the possibility that that is the source of the slowdown.

If it is suspected that it is a network problem, best bet would to be to load network monitor on the server and do a running capture with about a 25Mb file to give you time to get to it and stop it when the slowdown occurs. I would look to see if there are excessive broadcasts, or arps in the capture. If one station appears to monopolize the capture, what is it talking to and what type of traffic?

If the slowdown is consistent in duration, look for any mappings to non-existent machines or shares. Windows will attempt to refresh it’s connections anytime a file operation is attempted, and if there is a mapping to a non-existent share, it will take between one to three minutes to time out.

Also run task manager and have the processes sorted by the CPU column such that the one using the most CPU cycles is at the top. When this slowdown occurs, check to see if there is one particular process that is taking the time.You may want to use process explorer from sysinternals.com as it gives you much more info.

In 2000 as well as 2003 there are no BDCs, only DCs. I run File and print on DCs as well as member servers with no slowdown. Print could cause a problem if the volume is high, same for file serving. If you do not have a second DC, I highly recommend you set up a workstation as a second DC to preserve your domain in the event the main DC crashes. It would also take some of the authentication load off of the main server.

Lastly you may need to do a perfmon capture to see if you have a bottle neck somewhere. I would do the counters for Disks, memory, network, cache. These can be time consuming to go through and graph, but if you can ty them to a time that the slowdown occurs, you may be able to see a trend that indicates the problem.

By: natethegreat

natethegreat — Fri, 05 Nov 2004 11:32:16 +0000

The server is only a DC and file/print server. It is runnin norton antivirus corporate edition. The server seemes to always be running well. I did notice though that many of the users laptops were spewing out up to TRILLIONS of packets. Updatng the drivers on this seems to have helped. We have close to about 50 users. I will keep you posted. And thanks!

By: howard2nd

howard2nd — Fri, 05 Nov 2004 11:26:40 +0000

3 questions – Did you remove the IPX clients? Did you reset your router for IP and stop RIP? Did you check everybodys’ connection.

Number one cause for periodic LAN slowdowns is ‘Brodacast Storm’. One workstation, for whatever reason, can’t connect to a resource and starts yelling for ‘Who is?’ and the replies build and build and build.

Try a network monitor to see if you can ID the noisy system. Good luck.