Re: SOLUTION - Windows 2003 Large File Copy Performance Drops Off

Good to see a solution :)

Hard drive heating up within minutes, causing flaws around half of the progress...weird.

RAID Cache...yeah...vital :)


"Eric Barr" <ericbarr@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message news:6D2DE7D8-0790-457D-AFD6-1689180572EE@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
I've sorted out what was happening. My RAID card was to close to one of the hard drives. After a short period of activity the hard drive heat up enough to make the RAID controller's battery uncomfortable with the heat. As a result, the RAID controller disabled write caching and slowed the drives down to reduce heat. To fix the problem I moved the one hard drive mounted next to the controller and poof the problem disappeared. Now I'm getting in the 200-300 Mbs consistently across a 100 Gig copy. Now all I need to do is tune the TCP stack to get that up in the 500 Mbs range.

Sorry for any time/effort anyone wasted and thanks for all the help.

Regards,
-eric


"Eric Barr" <ericbarr@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message news:9BFB2E29-6844-4B3F-84C9-6D65C04414A9@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
All,

I've got a strange problem trying to copy large files. All weekend I've been trying to solve this problem and can't seem to find a newsgroup posting or KB article on point. After some trial and error I've narrowed the problem down to copying a single 5-8 gig file (it doens't matter which one). For the first ~3 Gigs (or maybe its first 3-4 minutes) I get 20-30% NIC utilization, then when the magic threshold is hit the speed drops off to about 0.5%. The drop is sudden and consistent.

Some other background:
- Source is Windows 2003 Standard
- Desitnation is Windows 2003 x64 Enterprise
- Each server has a gigabit NIC
- Links seem to be 1Gps full duplex
- Both servers have latest NIC drivers
- Both servers have SP2 & up to date on fixes
- Tried multiple Network Cables with the same results
- Tried multiple gigabit switches (nothing fancy, just unmanaged switches) with the same results
- isolated servers on their own switch with same result
- servers are doing nothing other than the file copy
- disk activity seems to be minimal
- No anti virus running
- Servers are just in workgroup

- Problem crosses problem doesn't is experienced using Windows Explorer, Copy, Robocopy, and even FTP
- Using mapped drive or UNC is no different
- Some have mentioned large file copies chewing up available ram, then slowing --- not the case here. Machines are using between 200-400 Megs of ram but have 2 gigs (source) and 8 gigs (destination) installed
- duplex mismatch -- doesn't seem to be the case here otherwise i wouldn't be consistently getting ~250Mbs for the first 5 minutes.



Thanks in advance if you can provide any help. I've been tearing my hair out for the past few days trying to track this down. I've got a close to a terabyte to transfer and speeds like that of a 56k modem is kind of a problem.

Thanks
-eric


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