How many users......?

[Maxell]

Hello,

We are experiencing intermittent slow-down in accessing files from our users home areas, and also at login to the system.

We currently have all of our student and staff 'home areas' on one Server 2003 machine. The same is true of the seperate server that takes care of our roaming profiles.

This gives us a potential of approx 350 - 400 concurrent users, and I was wondering if we are asking too much of one server to take care of it all?

There are no errors in the event logs, the server machines themselves are recent purchases and of a good spec.

How many users do you run 'per server'? Would it be worth us splitting the home areas and profiles over a couple of servers to try to spread the load a little?

Thanks for your advice...

Mark.

[DrPerceptron]

We used to all our drives from a single PowerVault 745n with SATA disks. It was not happy.

Largely it depends on your IO and disk speeds etc. SATA disks just aren't cut out for hundreds of users read/write, whereas if you look into SAS or SSD's there are much happier for it.

[ozzy]

Do you have that many log on requests at any one time? We have around 200 user accounts but the most logging on at any one time might be 35-40. I do think it is worth balancing the servers workload and maybe split the user areas between servers.
This is interestinghttp://www.derkeiler.com/pdf/Newsgro...05-02/0184.pdf

[Maxell]

Thanks for your advice.

We have almost 2000 user accounts in AD, and most of our ICT suites are constantly in use, so yes, it is quite likely that we could have 350+ users logged in at any one time.

It is just a bit of a puzzle, as there appears to be no issues in the logs, but we have this intermittent slow-down....

[dhicks]

there appears to be no issues in the logs, but we have this intermittent slow-down....

Crank up Windows performance monitor and see where the bottleneck is - RAM, harddrive or CPU. I'd guess it's either the performance of the harddrives or not enough spare RAM to act as a decent-sized cache. Do separate views of disk reads and writes - if performance drops when disk writes go up (i.e. at the end of a lesson when everyone saves their work) then the issue is write cache size. If you have a hardware RAID controller then check its cache is working (some refuse to work if the backup battery is iffy or missing and go to write-through mode). If that's fine then you could try seeing if more RAM helps.

--
David Hicks

[Zimmer]

It might be worth putting your staff and student home folders on two separate dedicated servers.