My company recently migrated about 500GB of files from our NetWare server onto a Filer. We're experiencing a performance problem with opening, copying, or moving multiple (more than 2) small files between the Filer and our users on NT Workstation. Each file has a latency of almost a full second to get processed (open, copy, move). This happens for files between 1K up to 1MB. Large files (over 5MB) don't display this latency. We've played with the CIFS options for TCP on the Filer and making registry changes on the NT workstations and still haven't seen a significant reduction in latency. We think we've narrowed the problem down to the TCP/IP stack in NT. A Win2K workstation with a 100Mb NIC experiences zero latency while an NT Server with a Gigabit NIC is painfully slow while working with the exact same small files.
Most of my experience is with Unix and NFS connections to Filers but I've been using CIFS to connect my NT workstation to our Filers for a couple of years and never really noticed this. Has anyone else experienced this latency issue with CIFS, NT and small files or have any suggestions on how to resolve it? My network administrator would like to see a Filer fix rather than have to touch 600+ PCs but I'll entertain any suggestions.
TIA,
Michael Cope UNIX/Linux Systems Administrator ISIS Pharmaceuticals mcope@isisph.com
UNIX is very user friendly... it's just highly selective about who it makes friends WITH!