Re: LAN Performance Not Up to Expectations

Bilbo <wlp<faux>fake<at>email wrote:
A small SBS2K3 with latest service packs. Server runs a 1.8 GHz
Pentium 4 with 3 GB PC3200 DDR RAM on an Intel D865GBF Mobo.
Server has two NICs. The LAN NIC is an Intel Pro/1000 GT Desktop
Adapter. The server is running 3.0 GB SATA Hard Drives and the LAN
was mostly quiescent during the test.

One domain client and three peer clients (who merely use the routing
services of the server). All but one client has Intel Pro/1000 GT
Desktop adapter, the other having USR Gigabit Ethernet PCI Adapter.

The LAN infrastructure is CAT-6 with a HP ProCurve 1800-8G Switch.
All these connections are reported by the switch as running at nominal
Gigabit speeds. No cable run exceeds 75 feet.

I was running NTBACKUP on the SBS server with backup target on one of
the peer client PCs as an experiment into the likely performance of a
NAS unit of some kind. I feel that the client PC was effectively a
NAS device during this run. It is a DELL Dimension 4700 with 3 GHz
Pentium 4, 4 GB PC2-3200 DDR2 RAM, and the USR NIC running WinXP SP2.

The only obvious bottleneck I can think of is the fact that the server
is running Trend Micro's Client/Server Messaging Security for SMB
(v3.6). The Client Anti-Virus was disabled for this test. It seems
to me that this rig should have really performed pretty well.

The network utilization viewed from the server and the target client
was only between 5 and 6 %. The size of the backup was about 108 GB
on disk and the backup took around five to hours forty-five minutes.

I reckon the net throughput to have been about 43 Mb/sec. Now,
allowing for all kinds of overheads and the like, this seems to be
pretty pitiful backup performance. There were NO events logged
indicating any network problems on either end of the test.

Does anyone have any insights to offer? How does one go about
troublehooting this kind of issue?

Thanks,



First off you need to run a simple baseline backup to the local disk on the server first. So do that and get a time - ideally to a second disk just used for backup on the server.

Then do a simple copy of the .BKF file across to your workstation and then look at the net utilisation. You will see a difference.



.

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