networking

[dawg]

I have a NT 4 server with 95/98 workstations. Our server has a 450MHz processor with 128MB of RAM. Our users are complaining about speed. Does anyone have any ideas about how we may increase our workstation speed. We already have a 10/100 switch, just to let you know.

Thanks,

Tim

 

[Required]

That will depend on what this server is doing. Is it a file server, an application server?
You should use the Performance Monitor to find where the bottleneck is (processor, RAM, disk(s), network), remove the bottleneck (mainly by adding new components or replacing them by faster ones) and repeat the operation until you get satisfying performance.
If you face many hard page faults and/or your file cache hits rate is low, more memory could help.
I can hardly give exhaustive explanations as performance and tuning are a really vast subject.

 

[wolluf]

Have they always been complaining? (or is this recent - have you added anything to network recently). What aspect of speed (file copies, application processing, just opening windows, etc). Unless there's lots of cpu intensive processing on the server, the spec you have should be fine. You say you have a 10/100 switch - what speed network cards do workstations have (obviously 100 mbs would be quicker than 10!)

PS. Have you got the desktop update that came with IE4 installed on the server? Don't know about over a domain, but in workgroup NT4 workstations with this installed and win9x workstations suffer a definite slowdown in network connection speed (I think there's a knowledge base article about it - also affects 2k/XP talking to win9x).

 

[dawg]

In response to wolluf, pretty much has been long term complaining. And as far as the slowness, it mostly comes from windows not opening fast enough.

Thanks guys for the responses so far. They have been much appreciated.

Thanks,

Tim

 

[Daveyboy2]

So the end users workstations are not working fast enough? If that's what you mean, I'm still not clear on what type of applications you have running, if any, over the network. Are you using it for storage? Are you using shared Databases? How many 95/98 machines?

Things to troubleshoot for a slow network:
1) Make sure you know that the NIC cards in the workstations are of a 10/100 nature.
2) Make sure all workstations are virus free
3) you still need to run the Performace Monitor to see what is happening on the server and for network traffic.

 

[1sexypapi]

what are your workstations doing?? and what kind of server is your NT 4.0 server? ie file server, app server..... also how many work stations and how far are they from the switch ? Another thing you could try ir adding a second NIC to your server and segmenting the network, but to get to the root of the problem need more info.

 

[dawg]

I am sorry for not specifying. We have an application on our server that everyone is using (about 12 users at a time). It works good most of the time, it is just slow in opening windows within the program sometimes.

Hope this is a little more specific. We are trying to make sure that everyone is restarting their machine on a daily basis to refresh the memory in the workstations. Is there anything else we could do?

Thanks,

Tim

 

[david902]

shut of unneeded services on the server to free up
cpu cycles. other than that, like everyone else says run
Performance Monitor.

 

[RonnieC]

This might be a daft question but is your switch of the store & forward variety as in packet buffering or is it one of the more common "I can switch between 10 & 100" because once i worked that one out the speed difference was amazing.

 

[BradSQLGuy]

Protocols or services you have on the server can cause this. Make sure that you don't use NetBeui running because that sends broadcasts taking up ALOT of your bandwidth. Also I'd double check your protocol bindings and make sure TCP/IP is first on the list. -Does that help ya?

 

[dawg]

I believe we have the more generic switch between 10/100 type of switch. Could you please give more info concerning the storing and forwarding switch you are talking about. Also, we have 10/100 NIC's in our workstations. The workstations are typically 350 MHz with 64MB of RAM with Win 98 on it. The server is an NT 4.0 on a machine with 450MHz, with 128MB of RAM. I am kind of a novice at this stuff, so I went to performance monitor as suggested above, but could not really make heads of tails out of the data it was displaying. Does anyone have any help they could give me on discerning what is what on performance monitor or a place to go read up on it?

Thanks for all of the responses so far. I think I am getting closer now.

Thanks,

Tim

 

[Kjonnnn]

When you say "slow opening windows" what do you mean?

What are your users accessing off of the server? (Are accessing applications off the server, or is the application [say Excel] on their computer, but they are accessing the data file from the server?)

What is running on the Workstations? What may be perceived as a slow network, may actually be slow workstations needing more RAM. (I had an instance where a user complained about the network speed, until I found they had about 15! things in their startup.).

 

[dawg]

We have an executable program that we have created here at our company specifically for our company. All of the screens,forms, and tables for this program reside on the server in which everyone using the program (approx. 12 users at any given time, sometimes more sometimes less)gets there information from this place. We had a guy come in and retool the program a while back in which he used ODBC for table accessing so that it would make the server do a little more of the processing. Most of our users do keep about 3 to 5 windows up at a time ie a internet browser, 2 instances of the aforementioned program, and a copy of another server based program (located on a different server). I have broken some of the programs up instead of one server serving 3 app's at a time I had some machines that were needed, but not heavily used that I put some of those programs on, after doing this, it seems to have helped quite a bit too. We try to tell our people to restart their computers at least once a day in that our workstations have Win 98 on them. Hope these specs help.

Thanks,

Tim

 

[RonnieC]

What i meant about the switch is this

My definition of a switched hub is a device that sends the tcp-ip packets to the correct destination only by intelligently looking at the address keeping a list internally of which address is connected to which port and sending it to that address only not broadcasting it to all of the ports on the hub. This means that the slower machines on the network are not receiving and having to ignore the large file transfer from another machine to/from the server. This type of hub gave me significant performance increases on the older machines.

Some 10/100 switches don't have this capability and quite happily broadcast to all ports although they do SWITCH between 10/100.
For instance i believe a D-LINK DES-1008D has the store and forward capability (cos i've got one here), maybe all the newer models do but it may be worth checking.