I have two AppleshareIP 6.3.2 servers sitting on one end of the room, and two Mac OS X 10.2 workstations on the other side of the room. Whenever I try to connect to the servers and copy files, it's ridiculously slow. 100MB worth of files takes two hours.
The problem seems to have gotten progressively worse. It's always been a bit slow, which I blamed on using Appletalk (a holdover from when we had more workstations running OS 9 and lower). Now it's just unusable. I've restarted the servers and workstations numerous times. Nothing has changed hardware wise with the hubs or the switches or the workstations or the servers.
Now, if I copy files between one server to another - which are on the same switch - it's lightning fast. If I string a cable across the room and plug a workstation into that same switch, copy speeds are also just as fast. To me this kind of rules out Appleshare IP server configuration problems, or a problem with that switch.
There is a pretty new Netgear hub in the network closet which handles all the traffic from all the wall jacks. OS X machines go into the wall, go up to the hub. Server traffic goes into their switch, and up to the hub.
TCP/IP speed tests from any system in that room are just as fast as ever, which makes me think that it's not a Netgear hub problem. I have a couple of Windows XP PCs in that room which don't have any speed issues to and from my Windows 2000 network. OS X straight TCP/IP stuff, like FTP and web browsing and downloading, is fast and fine. Those Windows PCS even connect and copy to those AppleshareIP servers (via windows file sharing protocol built into Appleshare IP) without any speed problems, and they're not on the same switch as the servers.
I hook up another OS 9.2.2 system in that room, and try to copy to/from the OSX workstations via plain old File Sharing and the speeds are terrible. This all makes me think that something has gone terribly wrong with the Appletalk protocol. I figure I would simply turn off Appletalk from the server side, disable it on the OS X machines, and connect everything via straight TCP/IP - but then the workstations never connect to the servers, they time out with an error. Even so, this is not an ideal solution as I still have a couple of older computers that sometimes need to be plugged in and get on the network via Appletalk.
For now I'm going to move the switch to the other side of the room and connect both OSX workstations directly into it. However that can only be a temporary solution, and I'm wondering what else I can do or what else I can look into.
Any ideas from any Mac experts?
