Tek-Tips is the largest IT community on the Internet today!

Members share and learn making Tek-Tips Forums the best source of peer-reviewed technical information on the Internet!

  • Congratulations TouchToneTommy on being selected by the Tek-Tips community for having the most helpful posts in the forums last week. Way to Go!

Network Performance w/Server 2000 AD

Status
Not open for further replies.

pvision

Vendor
Dec 11, 2002
66
US
We have a small network setup for one of our clients with a single Windows Server 2000 AD server. There are about 30 workstations running a Visual Foxpro app with a decent sized database. Response times for the software are much slower than the speeds quoted by the software vendor using our database on their Server 2003 network. Performance with Citrix/Terminal services was also slow.

We recently added a Windows 2003 server as an application server for this particular application. Response times for terminal services sesssions to this server increased significantly, but response times for network connected workstations did not. We have done the following to try to isolate the problem:

1) Tested and certified all of the cabling.
2) Replaced all of the switches with HP Procurve.
3) Updated workstation 3C905C-TX NIC card drivers, and tested all speed settings - 100-Half works best.
4) Verified that w/s DNS was pointing to the Server 2000 AD server, and that the "." zone had been deleted.
5) Had network monitoring done with a "sniffer" device, which found network traffic to generally be under 8% utilization, with peaks of about 25%.

Having eliminated cabling, switches, NIC cards, etc as the source of the problems, I suspect that it is a configuration issue with the server that is causing the performance issues. While we will be updated the server to Windows Server 2003 shortly, I would like to know what why we are having these performance issues.

I would appreciate any thoughts you may have on server settings which might affect response times for this VFP app.

Thanks
 
Other info:

AD Server is Dell PE2600 w/2GB, RAID5 3X18GB 15K RPM, Intel GB NIC, with Win2K Server and all service packs applied.

App server is Dell PE2850 w/4GB, RAID5 3X73GB 15K RPM, Intel GB NIC, and Windows Server 2003. It is not setup as a domain controller.

Most workstations are P4 2.4GHz 533MHz bus PC's with 20-40GB 7200RPM drives and 3C905C-TX NIC cards. The newer workstaions are P4 3.2GHz 800MHz bus PC's with 80GB SATA 7200RPM drives and integrated Marvell GB NIC (ASUS P5P800 MB)

Servers are connected at GB to switch, and workstations are all 100-Half (100-Full runs slower)
 
Status
Not open for further replies.

Part and Inventory Search

Sponsor

Back
Top