Troubleshooting Slowness

[MountainNetworks]

"Why is this so slow?!"

I've been getting hit with a lot of this from my clients lately. The truth...I have no clue.

There are two separate issues. I'll start with the most difficult first.

1. Two separate offices in the same building are sharing a full T1 internet connection. That means that someone generously gave us a port, which we connect a sonicwall SOHO3 firewall, and provide dhcp addresses to 3 computers. The two offices have no interaction with each other.

Ok, so this office that's on someone else's network...they've got a branch office. They have their own Business DSL connection and do a hardware to hardware VPN connection between these two sonicwall devices. All is good. Probably by coincidence, shortly after we got on our neighbor's network, they started complaining that at a certain time of day, their network speed slows to a crawl. Their network guy blames me. Well, of course...that's the easy thing to do. The truth is that there are only 3 computers at this office and they're really not doing anything. Yeah, they have access to the internet, but they're not really on it. Maybe it's related to #2...

2. A Windows 2000 Professional workstations slows to a crawl and eventually locks up. The only culprit seems to be spoolsv, which acts like it has a memory leak. Stopping and starting the service from the services menu corrects this problem...but only temporarily. The problem keeps recurring and we can't figure out why. It's only on one computer.

Any ideas? In general, what's the best way, or tool to troubleshoot unexplained network or desktop slowness?

Thanks....

 

[jrbarnett]

Are they set to download Windows Updates automatically (from Control Panel)? Alternatively are people doing some web surfing at the time or other downloads such as automated virus checker updates etc.

What time is the slowdown happenning? Is it the same time every day?
You say one computer runs Windows 2000 - what are the others running (this shouldn't matter, but it doesn't hurt to know).

John

 

[MountainNetworks]

All workstations are configured for automatic update, and for automatic virus updates, set to occur in the wee hours of the morning when the office is guaranteed to be closed. (01:00 to 04:00)

The slowdown occurs during business hours, in the latter part of the afternoon, and usually after 14:00

I should mention...all the obvious stuff has been checked. Myself, I'm a systems administrator. Now you know the level of stupidity I'm capable of

 

[jrbarnett]

Your network slowdown - it is in general use, or in internet access?
I have found that in different parts of the world, in different timezones, there are good and bad times for internet access. For example, it slows down after 11am here as America wakes up and starts surfing en masse (I am in the UK).

Quick point: If you and they share a firewall (and perhaps maybe a switch and hub) do they affect your network as well?
They could always set up monitoring on the firewall to see what is going on.

John

 

[HobbitK]

Is it possible you "uplug" all 3 of your office computers from the internet and hub/switch/router that is shared with the other office for just 1 afternoon?
If so, then if the other office has normal connection speeds, the problem is in your office or connections, if their speed is still slow, it is on their side or within the T1 line itself.
Michael

 

[MountainNetworks]

The thing is, this is a doctor's office. They're not "on" the internet...just connected to it.

To the point of disconnecting the 3 workstations from the network during the business day...this has been done, permanently. We got our own Fractional T1 at 512K speed. Now that we're off our neighbor's network, I'm waiting to hear back and see if they still report slowness.

For the record...blaming the "other" systems administrator is always the convenient thing to do. I hope their network is still slow because I may get a new client out of it

I've also downloaded a tool I found from recommendations of this site. It's called Qcheck from netiq.com. If they still report slowness, I'm gonna give it a good test drive.