Slow Fileserver Performance (2003)

[disinfo]

Hello All

The fileserver responsible for my student home shares is running really slow for reasons unknown, i wonder if anyone has any ideas that may help me.

Its a 2003 server running RAID 5 on a promise SATA controller.

Other Specs;

Xeon 2.8
1GB RAM

The server also runs as a domain controller and has the KS3 Pilot server running on it (sorry)

Its epecially slow when listing the home directorys folder, which has around 1900 folders in it.

Shares are done induvidually i.e. \\fileserver\username$ and a volume shadow copy is taken twice a day.

Looking at the perfmon console, there are no obvious indicators of a problem, availiable memory seems ok and average disk queue length is below the amount of spindles in the raid.

Im getting massive pressure from a particular member of staff at work which is not really helping, I dont seem to have much uninterrupted time to look into the fault and its causing me a lot of stress at the moment.

Mathew

[Norphy]

Are you booting from the RAID 5 array? I used to have a Promise TX4 RAID Controller and found that the OS was really slow when you booted from the RAID5 array. I put in a couple of extra hard drives, attached them to the motherboards IDE Controller and installed the OS on those instead, performance was much better.

I know that this is not what you call an easy solution, especially considering it it a domain controller too but that is what helped me.

[Geoff]

It sounds like a disk IO bottle neck to me. I know you've already checked the queue lengths. However also look at the following metrics:

* Request rate: Read / sec, write / sec
* Data rate: Bytes / read, bytes / write
* R/W ratio: (do the math on this one yourself)
* Latency: Second / read, second / write

[disinfo]

@NORPHY - Yes, i am booting the OS from the RAID, i cant for the life in me remember why I decided to to this, I have ample space on the server and could have split the OS into a different physical disk. I feel pretty dumb for doing this, but as you say its a big job to fix. The server seems to have gotten worse recenty. Its been runnig for about 8 months now.

@Geoff - Thanks, i'll take a look at those performance counters soon, i didnt mention though that the servers performance seems nearly the same when the network is quiet.

I was thinking of trying to run diskeeper on it as well, even though im unclear of the benefits of running it on a raid5, and the fact that it will wipe out my shadow copies.

Mathew

[k-strider]

i had horrible performance issues with one of my servers... it was the home drive server and held the profiles on the same server.. i off loaded the roaming profiles onto another server and its a lot better.. my problems were mostly experienced during login and the immediate few minutes after.
I intend to get a new server next year