Question

Slow navigation of fileshare over internet

Asked by: Borgs8472

My company has one main file repositary of project data (.psd, docs, jgps etc). It used to sit locally at our small office, however this set up made backups more complex and was problematic for remote access.

So I moved it to our main remote data centre and put it on a file share and arranged for people to map drives directly there. The backup could be handled at the data centre and remote access was now more flexible.

However there has been a major performance decrease when it comes to navigating around the moderately complex nested folder structure. Opening a folder can take 5 seconds, listing the contents another 5. Actually opening and saving files is at an acceptable speed still.

What (if anything) can I do to speed up navigation around this remote file share? Get peoples local machines to index its contents manually some how? Get the remote (windows) machine to make the data somehow more indexable? Something else?

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Asked On
2009-10-30 at 10:56:15ID24858908
Tags

unc windows file share

Topics

NFS File Server

,

File Servers

Participating Experts
1
Points
500
Comments
5

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Answers

 

by: holthdPosted on 2009-11-20 at 06:14:48ID: 25870358

Start with consulting your network administrator if the communication lines can handle the SMB traffic.
Would it be a solution to setup a share on the site and continuesly replicate the files?

 

by: Borgs8472Posted on 2009-11-20 at 09:53:42ID: 25872688

The bandwith between sites is pretty good, every other service, rdp, ftp, even opening files on the netbios share is fast, the exception being browsing the share. So I don't think the network is to blame.

I was considering a replicated solution, but that a fair bit of work for me (no domain) so I'd have to use command line sync tools / services to do a relatively bespoke solution. And if I'm considering that, maybe I should consider having the master copy sit in the office, and the replicated backup at the datacentre? I'm unsure what's the best idea.

 

by: holthdPosted on 2009-11-20 at 18:07:48ID: 25875936

It might be possible to enable indexing on the drives(?) at the clients, but that's only for the Windows search functionality.
You should, if possible, monitor the SMB traffic going over the link becuase there might be glitch in the causing this. I've seen it once before with one of my customers.
The problem then was with their local switches behind the router.

It's expensive to setup two shares with replication (hardware and hourrate) if you go for that solution. But if you do, you want to set the primary share up closest to the clients and replicate to the datacentre.
Have you tried running a ping from the client to the server hosting the share while the file system is browsed?

 

by: Borgs8472Posted on 2009-11-21 at 06:20:16ID: 31648144

I think you're right that it IS a networking issue. I hooked up to the share from home and browsing was much faster than from the office.

 

by: Borgs8472Posted on 2009-11-23 at 12:32:19ID: 25891270

Just to add, I browsed the share on the remote machine, it was slow there. The issue was actually server slowness.

20120131-EE-VQP-002

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