Slow Windows XP Pro

FYI - Slow Windows XP Pro

I have several new PC's on my Netware 4.11 system that ran slower than older Win98 boxes. I have run all over the Internet chasing XP optimization tips. (XP defaults certainly stink). Anyway, while many of the tips produced some speed increase, nothing was as dramatic as I felt necessary. For example, XP with or without XP-Service-Pack-2 made no difference. Netware client 4.9 SP2 was faster than SP1, but only a little bit.

Even optimized, a major program of ours that took 30 seconds on Athlon 850 Win98 boxes, and 20 seconds on Centrino WinXP-Pro IBM Thinkpads, took an agonizing 45 seconds plus to load on Athlon-64 3500 PC's with Asus motherboards and 1 gb of dual channel Crucial RAM running WinXP-Pro. Clearly not the results one would expect.

The problem now appears to have been the Novell Netware Client. 4.83, 4.90, SP1, SP2, it does not matter. Once I uninstalled the Novell client and installed the Windows XP client for Netware, my load times are under 15 seconds.

I do not have all the NWClient bells, and I had to go into Control Panel, CSNW and turn off print banners and notification, but the machines now run fast.

Though I am running fine now, if anyone can tell me why running the Novell client is three times slower than the Microsoft version I would love to hear it. The whole thing is murky to me because the IBM Thinkpads are running the Novell-Netware-Client-4.9-Service-Pack-2, and they are close to the speed of the now-fast Athlon-64 desktops. This tells me there must be some other issue at work, but after dumping probably 40 hours in the hunt, I am taking the easy way out of the woods. Hope this helps someone.


Roy

Try turning OFF file caching in the Novell client properties and see if this makes a difference with the XP machines.

File Caching was one of the tweaks I tried. It seemed to make a little difference but no more than one or two seconds out of the forty five. I am in the hunt right now for network card devices that are inappropriate. The PC's have a built in NIC on the motherboard and a 3Com 3C905 PCI card. When I showed hidden devices in Device Manager some of the items seemed strange. I know I despise the XP way of trying to "bridge" all your network devices together. If I wanted them together of course I would get rid of all but one of them. I need to do some testing but it appears I may be able to get some network speed increase by tossing some of these. More later.

Roy

The 3Com 3C905 PCI card should not be an issue as we have used many of these in this environment and they are one of the most reliable and seem to have no incompatibilities.
The only possible things I can think of are: were the xp machines in question upgraded from 98 or a fresh install? (an upgraded machine can be messy). SP2 does reset some settings back to default which can cause problems, but this appears not to be the issue here. Did you try uninstalling the Novell client (rebooting) then reinstalling the client, selecting only IP protocol? I also setup the login preferences (tree, etc).

The installs were from CD on brand new hardware. I have installed and uninstalled and reinstalled several versions of Novell client. As the server is running IPX, I have done IPX only installs and IPX/IP installs, with no discernable difference in performance. I wire in the tree and server in the Novell client. The login is fast, but access to applications on the server is slow. It made some speedup (a few seconds off the 45) to wire in the protocol of 802.3 instead of leaving it automatic in the XP networking setup. It made a small speedup to blow away the misc network items Windows had latched upon in My Network Places. I have a memory card reader so XP has assigned it four drive letters, and maybe XP is falling over its feet regarding this, but I have not found any setting to help things along. I run several drive maps, and depend on these very heavily, which again XP may be thrashing. I have my automatic services down to around a dozen instead of the reams MS thinks should be hogging resources. I am running Kaspersky Antivirus For Windows Workstations. I have uninstalled the antivirus a couple of times to see if it was having an XP moment, but no speedup resulted. I imagine it is one dumb setting in one dumb place that is shooting holes in my access speed with the Novell client, but I have not found the smoking gun. I wish I had a boot problem so the boot log could tell me something. Does anyone know of a resource monitor that logs all resource utilization so I can see who is sucking up my lifeblood?

Roy

This might sound like a crazy thing, so hear me out....

The Novell client is much more complex than MS client for NetWare. While the MS one is fairly dumb, it doesn't pay much attention to network conditions, errors, etc. The Novell client, on the other hand, cares about stuff like this. So if you have some kind of error condition on your network, the Novell client is likely to bring it out. I have no specific evidence or TIDs to show you to demonstrate this.. but I work on a lot of networks so I see a lot of things that most people don't.

That said, it's critical that your infrastructure is solid. That's your first thing to check. Make sure that the NIC on your server is set to the same Speed/Duplex as your switch. If you think it's good, RECHECK it. Check the lights or indicators or configurations or whatever.. Then check the server and make sure it matches.

Then check the switch ports that your workstations are plugged into. Make sure they are running at the speed/duplex you think they are. A lot of people recommend AUTO for switch and workstation so they will negotiate the best speed. This of course depends on your switch, so check the manual.

Then, check in MONITOR.NLM in the NIC stats and make sure there are no errors. Errors mean something is wrong. find it and fix it. Usually CRC or other errors mean that you have a duplex / speed mismatch somewhere.

Then once you have your infrastructer solid, make sure your frame types are matching up.. You say you are on 802.3.. which generally is fine but if you can you should try to use 802.2. 802.3 has flaws that Novell doesn't want to talk about.

Another thing regarding the frame type... With XP where you set the frame type to 802.3, you should also put in your Network Segment number, not just the frame type. Don't leave it 00000000. I have a link on my website with visuals if you want to look at it:
Once you make sure those items are good, then you can start wondering about tweaks and quick fixes for speedups. You could also do a packet trace using ETHEREAL ( to do a capture and find out what is actually going on.

You should also check this website.. I have found some good stuff there.



Marvin Huffaker MCNE, CNE
Marvin Huffaker Consulting, Inc.

Thank you Marvin. My infrastructure is solid. I have one or two transmit or receive errors listed out of 50+ million, and even that on only a couple of the error catagories. I mistyped the .3, as I set it to 802.2 and 00000002. I am running 100 at full duplex everywhere but on a couple of printer NIC's. From my switch I can see that the server has less than one hundred tx/rx errors over the last 5 years. And the final piece is that the XP laptops run the Novell client at full speed while the faster XP desktops do not. The ClientSpeed site is a good one. It provided many of the tweaks I have tried. So goes my career in IT, that all my troubles are unusual. But I do appreciate your effort, as well as agreeing that in most instance network problems are infrastructure problems.

Roy

There also may be some parameters you can tune on your NetWare server.. Look at your Directory Cache Buffers in monitor and tell me what they are at.

Marvin Huffaker MCNE, CNE
Marvin Huffaker Consulting, Inc.

700

700 is pretty low.

Set your Minimum Directory Cache Buffers to 700 and your Maximum Directory Cache Buffers to 1400. Watch the server for a couple days. Then whatever the Directory cache buffers is at, set that as minimum and double the max. Repeat until you find a nice cozy spot where the directory cache buffers don't go any higher. Set that as the minimum and double for the maximum. That will greatly improve file access performance.

While you're doing this process, watch your "total cache buffers" and make sure you don't deplete them too much, but if you have 1GB or more RAM, it shouldn't be much of a problem.

Marvin Huffaker MCNE, CNE
Marvin Huffaker Consulting, Inc.

Well, I am somewhat back to square one. The MS client for netware was so bug riddled that it is unusable.

The problem I have now is that about half the time my users cannot log in. After they enter their password the Novell client sits there with the "connecting cables" animation in front of the Big-Red-N. If they shut down their PC completely, let it sit a minute, then restart most of the time they log in with no trouble. Sometimes it takes three and four tries at this before they can log in. Other times it will log in right away. I have users running laptops that are running the same 4.90.2.20040617 client version which never encounter this problem. Does anyone have any ideas?

Roy

I have a suggestion. I had the same problem with the slow logins and my final solution was to get rid of the Netware client all together. I mean "What do you need it for?" the only station in the company I work for that has the netware client are the technicians workstation station. what are you trying to do that you'll need it. you'll have better control of your clients without it, unless you're using other netware products.

One persons opinion.

Technochick:

I think the answer to your question is as follows:

>>The MS client for netware was so bug riddled
>>that it is unusable.

That leaves me little other choice.

Roy

Roy, I agree the MS Client sucks. Have you tried putting the IP Address of your server into the Server field under Advanced and if so, do you get any improvement?

Also, check out this TID, in particular point IV regarding Tree Walking:


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"It's true, its damn true!"
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I will dig into the TID. I wish the twenty times I have done a search on Novell's site for this issue had bothered to bring up such a consolidation.

Since I am running 4 using IPX, the IP address concept in not applicable.

Roy

Sorry, always forget that... the TID should still help hopefully.

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"It's true, its damn true!"
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I know this post is closed but it hasn't resolved anything. I still don't see anything wrong with the MS Client. I've been using it for two years without any problems.
I've entered and can maintain my IP address through the novell server.
It's 10x Faster than the Novell client.
it doesn't take up as many resources as the Netware client
and it has Better security restriction than the Netware client.

- MS client uses IPX, not IP. Anyone wanting Pure IP cannot achieve this using MS client.
- MS client uses bindery services, not NDS. This severely restricts your ability to take advantage of NDS.
- Any benefits you gain by using the Novell Client and NDS are lost when you resort to the MS client.
- Anyone that says MS client is better is not making full use of their Novell servers. This is obvious because the MS client is so stripped down that it doesn't do much for you except map drives and capture print queues. With that, you're only using 10% of your servers functionality.
- With the MS client, you lose all the benefits of the heirarchical nature of NDS. This is blatenly apparent when you are working with login scripts.
- You cannot benefit from NDPS printing, including automatic deployment, management, and monitoring if you run the MS client.
- The MS client has no security restrictions. Windows has certain restrictions built in. The Novell client does not take those away. It actually adds to them and gives you extra features the MS client does not.
- With the MS client, you have to use Queue based printing. The PSERVER / Queue Printing model is a beast to manage.
- You don't understand DHCP. DHCP is platform independent. It has nothing to do with the MS or Novell Client. That point you made was irrelevant.
- The Novell client is a streamlined interface that makes a workstation sing.
- I could go on but won't.

Marvin Huffaker MCNE, CNE
Marvin Huffaker Consulting, Inc.

>>I know this post is closed but it hasn't resolved anything. I still don't see anything wrong with the MS Client. I've been using it for two years without any problems.
I've entered and can maintain my IP address through the novell server.
It's 10x Faster than the Novell client.
it doesn't take up as many resources as the Netware client
and it has Better security restriction than the Netware client.<<

One of the many problems it created is that no one running Excel 2003 could save a file to the Netware drives. It threw an error saying someone was already in the file. Made MS client go away and problem went away. There were other problems but that was a show stopper. So in my world, the MS client was unusable.

As far as the speed issue goes, no one here seems to have ever actually read what I wrote. It is not an infrastructure issue because other XP workstations do not suffer. It is not a client issue, because other XP workstations use the same client yet do not suffer. The only real difference between the workstations is that the ones that run the slowest are by far the faster PC's.

I have seen a thread elsewhere since I posted that said he was having the same issue with some PC's being too fast for the Novell client. That is certainly what appears to be happening in my world. Sdaly, that other thread has not come to any resolution I have seen.

Roy