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FattyPoFlag for United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland

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Windows 8 PC shared folder + Slow for users to access

Hi,

I have a customer who does not have a budget for a server until next year. So in the interim I have installed a W8 PC with a secondary drive for Data access. This is shared on the network. This is a solid state harddrive.

When the users access the network share \\PCName\shared folder it operates as expected. When we open an office document there is a short delay, but when we save a document/s it takes around 5-7 seconds.

The PC's accessing the Windows 8 are running a mixture of W8 and W7.

I have added the location in trusted locations, disabled the AV and this makes no difference.

Can anyone advise if this is the best it will operate or is there anything else I can try?

Many thanks in advance.
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Jerry Mills
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Lots of possibilities here.  I would start by 1) Check name resolution - make sure DNS server for NIC interface only has one local DNS server.  2) Monitor CPU performance on the storage PC to see how busy it gets during a save.  3)  Set NIC interfaces to only use IPv4.  4) If you know wireshark - monitor the transaction and look for resets, bad packets etc..
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ASKER

PC's are on IPv4 only, only 1 DNS entry and when you access the file or save the W8 PC is on 1% CPU usage.

I will try wireshark.

Thanks
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ASKER

OK I have run a Wireshark and can see no bad packets, however when the delay occurs the Protocol is SMB2, so I am wondering if it revolves around this?
A couple of things:

Try LMCompatibilty:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/239869

To activate NTLM 2 on the client, follow these steps:
1. Start Registry Editor (Regedit.exe).
2. Locate and click the following key in the registry:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Control
3. Create an LSA registry key in the registry key listed above.
4. On the Edit menu, click Add Value, and then add the following registry value:
Value Name: LMCompatibility
Data Type: REG_DWORD
Value: 1 (for legacy systems)

Also run Disk Defrag on the Windows 8 machines to make sure the drive is not hunting for files.
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ASKER

W8 PC is 2 weeks old and defragging SDD's are not a good idea.

Also all clients are W7 or W8, and the "server PC is W8" two weeks old. I have just tried several files and the only issue I can now find after disabling TCP Offload on the NIC IPv4 is opening and saving/closing an excel spreadsheet which is 10MB in size so I guess we would expect to see a small delay of 3 seconds here?
If the Windows 8 machine's main drive is SSD, yes, do NOT defrag it. And SSD Disk access will not be slow.

Try LM Compatibility.
I believe you are now on the right trail with the SMB2.  The delay occurring during the SMB2 packets suggests that.   I don't know the answer but take a look at this:  http://wiki.wireshark.org/SMB2
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ASKER

Thanks for the response, the customer now needs to work so I will try the suggested and update in the morning.

Many thanks
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Please try without AV software. Disabling AV is not the same. Uninstall at the server and at the client side.
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ASKER

Hi all, apologies for the delay. I was waiting customer feedback from the changes. OK all above has been tried and tested and the only conclusion we have drawn is that the one file is over 10mb and takes around 2 seconds to open/close. All the smaller and new files are fine.

So unless anyone has any other suggestions the customer has accepted this as the are using a desktop and not a server as they should be.
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John
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ASKER

Thanks for confirming the speed is normal.
@FattyPo  - You are very welcome and I was happy to help.