AWS Thinkbox Discussion Forums

main fileserver slow (not deadlines fault) ... advice?

heya,



figured most people here would be running similar setups to ours (windows network, smb filesharing etc), hopefully someone here could give some advice.



we’re running about 15 workstations on a gigabit router, all talking to a central window server 2003 machine running a raid5 u320 box. Of late we’ve noticed its running slower and slower. Been running various tests and optimisations (firmware upgrades, driver updates etc), no major improvements so far.



Quite sure its not network related; other machines can copy files directly between each other perfectly fast. I suspect its the scsi device itself; been watching access speeds via the performance monitor, the disk queue redlines occasionally, which is when we call get a big network hang.



Before I do drastic things like re-installs and whatnot, can anyone suggets a basic checklist to troubleshoot the server?



As a friend pointed out, its not much use talking to non-post IT guys, they don’t understand us. We’re special. :slight_smile:



Thanks,



-matt



Oh yeah, deadline 2.5 install this week, promise…

Hi Matt, we fought and fought here with network performance untill the management decided to spend some money and get high quality switches, we use extreme networks switches and the performances increase was huge.



It might not be the case for your setup thouhg. My suggestion is not to buy cheap Dell switches, instead go for the high-end stuff.



Maybe there are resellers that are ready to give some hardware for testing for a period of time, it might help find where your bottleneck is.



Sylvain Berger | Technical Director | Alpha Vision


Thanks for the reply! yeah, we started with cheap stuff, been gradually upgrading components where we can.



on the face of it, everything should be of adequate standard. switch is layer 2 managed, and testing to and from other machines is all fine (eg, we can all map to the FCP machine and its xserve raid, and access files fast… we don’t dare mess with the edit machine like this regularly though!)



The server itself is a dual xeon HP, 4gb ram, with a external 14 drive bay, 9x300gb 10,000 rpm disks connected via scsi U320. Again, the specs seem fine, but the performance is terrible.



We’d love to replace the server, but the job only runs for another few months, then we all go seperate ways. Not enough time to invest in a complete new server, nor enough time to test/trial new equipment. We’re in an awkward position… :slight_smile:



Thanks again for your reply. Anyone else got cunning suggestions?



Thanks,



-matt

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