Question Accessing data on the new server is slower than it was on a 10 year old server

[zipz422]

I replaced a server for a client with a new one that's much faster, but the employees on the workstations say accessing the files are slower, especially searching. I did turn indexing on on the server. Data is on the RAID drives. Might throw in an SSD to see if that fixes things

Any other ideas or suggestions?

Gigabit Network

Server:

IntelE-2468 2.6G 8 Core, 32GB RAM,

1TB SSD for OS

2 x 4T hard drives in a mirrored RAID

Windows Server Essentials 2022

 

[dave_the_nerd]

Search indexing will absolutely %{*#€£ a spinning hard drive. It will be obvious in Resource Manager if there’s a big IO queue and if IOPS for the hard drives are maxed out. (It’ll max a hard disk at ~100 IOPS for hours and is basically unresponsive the entire time.)

I’d probably try to get details on what is or is not slower than it was on the old server. Just general statements like that aren’t super helpful.

And then I’d look at resource monitor on both systems while that activity is happening, to see if there’s a bottleneck I didn’t consider. (Maybe a NIC autonegotiated to 100Mbps because of bad wiring or something.)

And also go through the log in event viewer on the server to see if it’s logging I/O errors or waits.

I have had a number of “bad” hard drives and RAID arrays over the years that turned out to be bad SATA cables. Bring fresh cables.

If everything is working like it’s supposed to (no errors, file transfers at >75% of line speed, no ram or cpu bottleneck one on the server) then upgrading to an SSD for data storage should help if the client is dealing with lots of small files. A fast HDD still has access lag of around 5-10ms, which is several times longer than the network will make you wait. With an SSD the network becomes the bottleneck again.

 

[Fallen Kell]

What was the old server? We have plenty of 10 year old things that run quite fast since they had high performance SSDs, or large numbers of 10k or 15k RPM drives in RAID 1+0, 5, 6, 50, or 60, that would easily outperform 2x 4T hdd drives (which depending on the RAID controller is no faster than just a single drive, and in some cases slower, since it is only as fast as the slowest of the two drives).