Novell Network

[BrettW]

We are running a Novell Network with the following statistics:

NetWare 4.12 SP 7
Server: Compaq Proliant 2500 Dual PII 200, 320MB Ram, six 4.3 GB SCSI Compaq Hard Drives with full RAID divided into two partitions
Network: 3Com Superstack II Switch 3300 connected to six 3Com Superstack II Dual Speed 10/100 Hubs to which about 75 computers connected

Question: When I want to copy something, say from the root of SYS to my hard drive it takes forever. The strange part is that if I copy 1 file that is 200 MB it takes very little time (a few minutes tops). But if I copy 200 files of 1MB each it can take up to 8 hours. Any idea what the root cause of this is and what I might do to make our network run better? Thanks.

 

[trevorh13]

Have you tried using the monitor to utility and checking the number of current disk requests. If you have a number which you consider to be large for your network then it may be worth looking at your drives, over time they do slow down with heavy use. If you suspect that is not to blame then it may be worth introducing a second server to split the load. Also have a look at the statistics for your network card. My network tends to pull lots of small files which was causing collisions on the servers LAN interface. I added a second network card which solved the problem with collisions on the server link. Hope this is useful.

 

[FredWagner]

In addition to balancing the load with more NICs, check in NWINSTALL and see if by any chance Compression is enabled on the drive you're using - decompressing files takes huge CPU cycles, and if the files are scattered around the drive, that could make it worse. Also, why are you STORING anything in the Root of SYS?? SYS should be reserved for system files, public files, maybe print queues. Be careful not to let it get full, or your server will slow down terribly. Decompressing files on SYS could cause a similar effect. Is immediate purge set to ON for that Volume? If not, see if it helps.

Fred Wagner
frwagne@ci.long-beach.ca.us

 

[SM777]

You say this is when copying to your hard drive. Is it just your PC that is slow?

I'd look at your cache settings in windows and in your client32 settings. Excel and powerpoint can suffer really badly from incorrect cache settings. I had a user with a 1Mb spreadsheet which was linked to a 100K spreadsheet. On one pc it took 25 minutes to open, on another it took 15 seconds. The difference was that the first had client caching disabled.

Are you using windows explorer to copy files? try opening up a dos box and using xcopy. I always use xcopy rather than windows explorer. Its faster and explorer creates those annoying TEMP.DIR files which fill up your server with deleted files.