Slow file access through network

[FrankSaucedo]

What is the best way to boost my network performance????

I have a LAN with 7 clients and 1 file server. All the clients are 1.6Ghz Pentium 4's running windows 2000 professional. The file server is also a 1.6Ghz Pentium 4 running windows 2000 advanced server. Everything is wired with cat5 wire through a network switch. The network cards are 3com 10/100's.

The only program we use is a 3D engineering application originally designed to run under unix. I beleive my bottleneck lies in that data is stored in the file server as thousands of small files (most under 100 kilobytes).

The server has a 36 gigabyte seagate 15,000 rpm, controlled by a scsii 160.

Are there any 'tweaks' to windows that could increase performance?

What is the best 'bang for my buck' upgrade that i could make?


Any help would be greatly appreciated.

 

[Fiveohhh]

Your best bet to get more throughput would be gigabit. Make sure your switch is 100 too. I don't think theres much else you can do software wise. its your hardware holding you up.

 

[wlee]

How much Ram do you have in the server ? I've found that 1GB+ seems to be the magic number with Win2K Server. You might also look into getting a Gigabit switch and a Gig card for the server.

 

[Cheetah8799]

If you only have 1 hard drive, you could setup a hardware raid with multiple drives to improve speed. Obviously this would cost money to buy the hardware, and the OS may need to be re-installed.

Try copying 1 single large file from the server to another maching just to test the network speed. Maybe you will find the problem isn't the network, but rather the drive.

If all 7 people try to get a bunch of small files each at the same time, I could see that single drive performing poorly.

 

[FrankSaucedo]

I've got 1gb of ram on the server.... 512mb on each client...

first.. thanks for the advice

i do have 2 hard drives on the server. an IDE drive for the operating system. and the fast scsii drive for the data. We keep our engineering jobs on the server. Here's one of the jobs. 270MB made up in 22,772 files. I can copy a single 100MB file in about 10 seconds, however copying the above mentioned job takes over 4 minutes. Is this normal????