WS2003 acting very slow as a general-purpose fileserver, especially for 10-20 mbyte MS Word documents.

We have a dual-processor P4 dell server running Win2003 server, and it takes
about 5 times longer to save a 20 meg Word document (MS Word 2003) to
Win2003 over the network than to our hard drives. We also have a Linux box
running Samba, and saving to it takes about 1/3 of the time to save to the
network drive on that box.

The Windows Server 2003 machine has the Previous Versions feature enabled,
so that is one of my theories as to why it is slower, but not the only
reason. We find that in general, Word is much slower to save to the
network, it freezes up completely for 10-15 seconds every time it saves to
the Server, which is much worse than other applications we use which access
the network. Looking at my Task Manager's network tab, I don't see that
this machine is saturating its 100baseT network connection, and looking at
the whole network's traffic levels, using Ethereal, I notice that the whole
network is loaded to about 2-10% with one or two spikes of 3-5 seconds where
usage is closer to 20%-60% in an average minute. So that leaves the whole
network wide open, and this server, which has CPU usage of nearly zero,
inexplicably slow doing basic file-server tasks.

We have considered moving all our network document folders onto a
less-powerful PC running Samba, if we can't figure out why WS2003 with all
this expensive hardware and so much RAM, IDE PERC RAID5 9000 RPM disks, and
DUAL cpus, is so slow, and my little-dell-dimension desktop with a single
7200 rpm SATA drive is over four times faster when saving word documents
over the network to it.

What can I try next? Can anything be misconfigured in a network such that
saving word documents is slow, but loading them is still fast? Why does Word
work less well with Windows Server?

Here are my results so far loading and saving a 20.5 mb Word document to my
linux and my winserver2003 server:

----
windows 20mb save 16 sec 1.25 mbytes/sec
server 20mb open <1 sec 40 mbytes/sec

----

linux 20mb save 4 sec 5 mbytes/sec
server 20mb open <1 sec 40 mbytes/sec

----


Regards,

Warren

Warren Postma wrote:
> What can I try next? Can anything be misconfigured in a network such that
> saving word documents is slow, but loading them is still fast? Why does Word
> work less well with Windows Server?

Do you get any event log entries on either the client or the server?

Regards,
Martin

> Do you get any event log entries on either the client or the server?

Nothing that seems relevant. I found a DNS reverse-lookup zone didn't exist
so I created one.
No change on performance though.

Warren