What Causes Network Slow–Easy Wayout

Published June 11th, 2009

How to find the bottleneck in your network NetTrans drivers. Start off with a baseline, transfer a file from server to workstation. Do the same from multiple workstations. Make it a large file (several Gig’s if possible), time how long it takes. Do the same to multiple servers if possible.

This is your baseline, keep these numbers recorded, we will come back to it. It’s essential to know what kind of switch you have, let’s presume you have a managed gigabit switch. Let’s also assume you are seeing 1000 speed on all ports, if any port is not full speed check the mac and then use arp to identify the ip address of the device plugged into that port. Make sure none of your tests are under speed. When you run the test be sure to know the status of your environment at the time, ie: are any systems using up the bandwidth, are there any workstations listening to internet radio. Just be sure to know your environment.

If your network was still and quite during the test, make note of it. Now that we have an idea of how your network is working, you probably have a reason for reading this article, something prompted you to look up solutions to this issue. You can’t copy files quickly enough, internet is slow, email is slow, something caused you to feel there was a problem, and you felt it was network related. Try doing that activity again, document the speed of your results. Check the math to be sure you are correctly diagnosing this error as “network slowness”, by that I mean do not assume it’s network slowness if it’s an email server problem, or if your service providers internet speed was temporarily compromised.

A network lag issue is a trouble on your LAN from one node to another. If the file is 30GB and you expect it to copy in 10 minutes then re-run your math, you don’t have a network error. But if you transfer a 1GB file it’s equivalent to 8Gb, so expect a good minute to account for transfer as well as local I/O. If you can’t get a 1 Gig file transferred in under a minute you need to run perfmon to identify any potential slowdowns on both machines. The question to be answered, is anything else requesting information from this system. If perfmon shows no activity prior to the transfer attempt on both systems, then you should look at the following: the problem could be with your network card driversdownload NetTrans driver, wiring, switch, physical problem with your network card hardware. As always full spyware/antivirus/maleware check is recommended.

If your perform shows higher than 2% on I/O in the queue then you should look at defragmentation. Usually the problem is with the network card driver, sometimes a netmon will reveal voip traffic clogging up the switch in general or some other network noise. Following these steps can help identify network slowness.

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