Hi
I have a couple of issues on our company network.
The first is thate a single large file copy imapcts the entire network and dramatically reduces network speed and the second is that there are periodic outages where file open/close/save operations may appear to hang, and also where programs that rely on network connectivity e.g. email, appear to hang. It is as though the PC loses it's connection to the network, but the status of the network icon does not change. For the second issue if we wait the program will respond but the wait period can be up to 1min. The downside of this is that this affects Access databases on our server so that when an 'outage' occurs the Access client cannot recover and hangs permamnently.
We have a Windows Active Directory domain that comprises Windows 2003 R2 (soon to be decommissioned), Windows Server 2008 Standard and Windows Server 2012 R2 Standard domain controllers. There are two member servers: A file server running Windows 2008 Storage Server and a remote access server (which also runs WSUS) running Windows Server 2012 Standard. The clients comprise about 35 Win7 PC's and 1 Vista PC.
When I copy or move a large file from the 2008 Storage Server to my Win7 client other staff experience massive slowdowns when accessing the network. Recently I was moving several files from the Storage Server to my local drive. The files comprised pairs (e.g. folo76t5.pmm and folo76t5.pmi), one of which is less than 1MB and the other varies between 1.5 - 1.9GB. I was moving two files at a time so the total file size for each operation was just under 2GB.
While the file move operation was taking place a colleague was trying to open a 36k Excel file. After waiting 3mins he asked me for help. I did some tests and noticed that when I was not copying large files he could open the Excel file immediately. When I started copying more data from the Storage Server to my local drive it took several minutes before his PC could open the Excel file.
I also noticed on my Win7 client that our email client (Pegasus Mail), which was the only application I had open at the time would hang when the move operation was started and it would take at least a minute for it to start responding.
Ordinarlily we work with many files
Anyone have any suggestions, please? This is something that is affecting all clients. I can't carry out file maintenance on large files during normal work hours if network speed is going to be so badly impacted.
I'm still working on the intermittent network outages (the second issue), but if anyone has any suggestions about what may be causing this I would be grateful if you could share them.
Thanks