Multiple user opening One Single Office File - Performance Issues. Exhausted.

[Alctaraz]

Hi All, We are hoping some of you may have come across the issue of multiple users(30 ish), opening an office file at the same time and these files taking several minutes to open. The first machine or 2 will open these files immediately followed by a long delay for the rest of the machines.

 

We have isolated the issue down to office, as opening any file which doesn't appear to use OpLocks, I.E. Notepad or Adobe Photoshop, doesn't have the same the same effect. Whatever the file size, these open instantaneously.

When opening Office 2013 as a blank template, with no file to load. It ALWAYS loads instantly.

 

We went to the trouble of changing the share from Server 2012r2 to Server 2008r2(due to running Windows 7 clients we wanted to ensure maximum compatibility between Server and client, I.E. SMBv2 on both) and this seems to have slightly speeded up the opening of these files from around 5 mins to around 2-3 minutes on average. May I also add the size of the file does not make any difference to the speed of opening, it can 12kb or 12mb, it really makes no difference.

 

All our servers are visualized files servers running on 2012r2 Hyper V Failover cluster.

 

We have recently updated all our broadcom host server drivers, as we read that some of the older drivers had issues when running VMs and NIC teaming.

 

We really feel we have exhausted all avenues for finding a solution, and would like to know if anyone here has encountered or better yet resolved these issues.

 

Thankyou.

[Meldrew]

Is your share & permissions read only or is the share writeable. I'm wondering if word is trying to save its temporary file alongside and is failing due to permissions and taking ages in the process.

 

Meldrew

[Alctaraz]

Hi Meldrew, the share is setup as Read Only for students and Read and Write for staff. Although this is usually quicker for students than staff... but I would need to confirm by doing further testing.

 

If you make a file read only in office 2013, and allow students to open it, it opens almost instantaneously.

 

Hope this helps...

 

- - - Updated - - -

 

It does sound like you could be on to something here...

[agibson]

Hi

 

We had this issue also, after a lot of trial and error the only thing we could do to make it work at a reasonable speed was to default our Win 7 machines back down to SMB1.X as per How to enable and disable SMBv1, SMBv2, and SMBv3 in Windows Vista, Windows Server 2008, Windows 7, Windows Server 2008 R2, Windows 8, and Windows Server 2012 - not a preferable fix, but it worked for us.

 

Andy