File transfer speed issue

Joemonkey

Diamond Member
Mar 3, 2001
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I noticed one of the users here at work was having an issue transferring a large amount of files over to one of our servers. It was about 700mb worth of stuff, and it took around an hour. I did a quick and dirty test, transferring a 12MB PDF file various ways. Here are the times:

My PC to server: 40 seconds

My PC to her PC: 10 seconds

Her PC to my PC: 10 seconds

Her PC to server: 39 seconds

Server to My PC: 2 seconds

Server to her PC: 3 seconds


I did a little bit of performance monitoring and everything looks good, no queues etc. I also checked task manager and the network usage never went over .5%

What is going on?
 

Fardringle

Diamond Member
Oct 23, 2000
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Just from looking at those numbers, it looks like your server is having issues writing to its local drives (receiving files) fast enough to keep up with the network traffic. Reads appear to be great since transfers from the server are very fast.

I would suggest some benchmarking tests on the disk/file system on the server to see if what kind of results you get. (SiSoft Sandra's Hard Disk test might be a decent place to start.)
 

spidey07

No Lifer
Aug 4, 2000
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first thing is check the speed/duplex on the server and its switch port. make sure both are set to 100/full or both are set to auto.

Next would be to replace the cable from the server to the switch. Looks like a problem on the receive pair of the server.
 

Joemonkey

Diamond Member
Mar 3, 2001
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Originally posted by: spidey07
first thing is check the speed/duplex on the server and its switch port. make sure both are set to 100/full or both are set to auto.

Next would be to replace the cable from the server to the switch. Looks like a problem on the receive pair of the server.

I was leaving out a part of the information on purpose hoping someone else would come to this conclusion about the cable. I suspect there is cat3 in the wall and that may be the entire problem. I am also defragmenting the HDD hoping it might help as well, as it may simply be a disk access issues like Fardringle suggested.
 

Fardringle

Diamond Member
Oct 23, 2000
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The reason I didn't point to cabling/switch issues is because the downloads from the server (reads) are extremely fast, which wouldn't be likely if it was a cabling issue. Of course, it's still possible and is certainly worth checking as well, but I personally likely a drive performance problem, particularly when writing to the disk(s).
 

Joemonkey

Diamond Member
Mar 3, 2001
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Originally posted by: Fardringle
The reason I didn't point to cabling/switch issues is because the downloads from the server (reads) are extremely fast, which wouldn't be likely if it was a cabling issue. Of course, it's still possible and is certainly worth checking as well, but I personally likely a drive performance problem, particularly when writing to the disk(s).

Here is a pic of the performance monitor. Note a defrag was in process when this was taken.
 

spidey07

No Lifer
Aug 4, 2000
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Originally posted by: Fardringle
The reason I didn't point to cabling/switch issues is because the downloads from the server (reads) are extremely fast, which wouldn't be likely if it was a cabling issue. Of course, it's still possible and is certainly worth checking as well, but I personally likely a drive performance problem, particularly when writing to the disk(s).

actually a duplex mismatch or cabling problem can result in poor one-way performance.

Biggest one is a "split pair" in which the transmit or recieve pair of the cable is split - one wire of the pair is pinned correctly, the other is not. So in that scenario only one way is affected.