SharePoint Bandwidth Issues

[southwell]

Hello,

I am a sysadmin not a dba but have to wear many hats so let me try my best here. Setup is a SBS 2008 with 2 servers. One with sbs apps and the other with windows 2008 standard and SQL 2008 standard sp2. We were running WSS 3.0 and were having performance issues with bandwidth. It would not download faster than 250/Kbps for any files accessed through the

http://companyweb.

They are connected through a 1Gbps switch. IIS SharePoint site has the bandwidth set to 4294967295 bytes/second same with # of connections. If I try to download the same 30MB file through webdav in explorer it downloads in seconds at 2MBps.

Since SharePoint Foundations 2010 came out I thought what the heck, I’ll just reinstall everything and see if that makes a difference. Upon installation I realized that SQL was setup on 32 bit of windows. So I decided to download SQL Express 2008 R2 and install this on the SBS 2008 server on the same box, this was big mistake later on. Got everything installed and up and running. Fix the bandwidth issue and everything ran much much faster including page loads.

Everything was perfect until I was told we are going to be adding massive amounts of data very soon. I had already been reloading the Windows 2008 server (second box) with the 64 bit OS and installed SQL 2008 64 bit to prepare to migrate back since this was just temp because of the 10GB limit on express. However upon trying to attach the content database back to SQL 2008 I discovered I could not attach an older version 661, it only supports 662 and earlier. Error message didn’t make sense. Version 661 IS earlier than 662 but MS database versioning’s are weird for SQL 2008 RTM SP2 (662) and R2 (661). Anyway googling it answered my question, cannot downgrade database to SQL 2008 SP2 after attaching to a SQL 2008 R2 database PERIOD. GREAT, export data wizard did not map tables properly when trying to reattach that way. Got some error when attaching in SharePoint saying it couldn’t find some table. Ended up having to restore a backup from before the upgrade to R2 and start over. Not that it matters now but if there was a way to do it without scripting it all out I would have liked to know how.

Now everything is back up and running in a new 64 bit installation of both SharePoint Foundations on web front end and SQL 2008 SP2 on the second windows server. New SharePoint farm, iis sites, config and admin databases, attached content database just as before. However I am still having the SAME exact issue with the 250/Kbps download limit when downloading large files! Tried googling the issue didn’t find anything. Set memory limit on SQL server to 2200MB out of 4GB physical and that didn’t make a difference. Looked in resource settings is central admin and didn’t see anything different than when it worked with SQL 2008 R2 express on the same box. The files still download fast 2MBps when through webdav from explorer. I can also copy large files (obviously since I copied the 10GB database to and from SQL box) between the servers just fine. My initial though would be it’s the SQL machine since that seems to be the only variable but why can I transfer data from explorer just fine? What am I missing?

Thanks for your help in advance.

 

[mrdenny]

Odds are it is an IO problem. The design of the SharePoint databases is crap to say the least. Check the IO performance of the database's hard drives as well as the output from the sys.dm_os_wait_stats DMV. These should give you a good idea as to where the problem is coming from.

Denny
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[southwell]

Denny,

Thank you for your reply. I just recently figured out the problem and am still trying to get it solved. It is an issue with Trend Micro Worry Free Business Security 7.0. The client on the desktop is scanning the larger files at an incredibly slow rate for some .PDF and other is is a little faster.

Network shares and webdav is ok. Only problem is downloading through the website. When you save the file to your computer by using the download a copy option throught the sharepoint website it uses the typical method IE8 downloads files and it shows it coming from the host "companyweb." Not http:// or anything like that. There is nothing is the TM admin console that allows an exception or whitelist that would be able to make this work either (whitelist only allows "

http://"

and requires a TLD at the end. ex ".com"). Disabling website filtering does not make a difference. It is in the antivirus real time scan engine I believe. Haven't narrowed it down yet. Still have a case open with Trend Micro. However unloading the client lets the 30MB PDF download in a second. I can't believe I forgot to check this before.

Large pictures don't seem to be an issue. Don't know why it makes such a fuss over PDFs. When choosing to open it in internet explorer the PDFs work some of the time for smaller files. Larger files just hang the browser or show page cannot be displayed. I am using Windows 7 and Adobe Reader X. Just wanted to let everyone know out there what I've found in case they experience the same issues.

Thanks.