mdrabble Posted January 22, 2020 Posted January 22, 2020 Had reports that since Monday the whole school is having issues with computers and applications being slow and sometimes not responding. This can be simply browsing network drives for files to trying to use any application such as powerpoint, word, outlook - where they stop responding and then continue to work as normal. Things I have checked.... No config changes have been made No updates have been applied or trying to install. I have Windows 10 EDU 1803 and 1909 editions exhibiting the same issues. I have ran continuous pings to a number of servers and they all respond as normal with not timeouts I have ran continuous pings to a number of switches and all responded as normal. Switches have Spanning Tree enabled so I am ruling out a loop. VLAN routing seems ok as I can trace route without issue No Backups are taking place, so that should affect things. Anyone anything else they can suggest checking? Cheer in advance. Mark
Jcx500 Posted January 22, 2020 Posted January 22, 2020 Do you have adobe CC? ,We had slow downs when a large number of students were syncing files to adobe cloud
Mark182 Posted January 22, 2020 Posted January 22, 2020 What switches/core do you have? Maybe check the RAM and CPU utilization on them? See if any are misbehaving?
WorksOnMyPC Posted January 22, 2020 Posted January 22, 2020 (edited) Do you have Smoothwall? I noticed recently that if you do large file transfers and smoothwall is set as your DFG it causes massive lag spikes on the LAN. Edit.. Also do you use Panda? The update has killed machines lateley Edited January 22, 2020 by WorksOnMyPC
mdrabble Posted January 22, 2020 Author Posted January 22, 2020 Do you have adobe CC? ,We had slow downs when a large number of students were syncing files to adobe cloud Yes we have Adobe CC but we don't have people using the cloud sync What switches/core do you have? Maybe check the RAM and CPU utilization on them? See if any are misbehaving? Checked switches and all appear normal. DLink Core Fibre Switch, Unifi EdgeMax Lites and all normal. Do you have Smoothwall? I noticed recently that if you do large file transfers and smoothwall is set as your DFG it causes massive lag spikes on the LAN. Edit.. Also do you use Panda? The update has killed machines lateley Yes - use smoothwall and that is showing no large transfers and ram/cpu all normal AV is Windows 10 Defender/SCCM Endpoint
jcs808 Posted January 22, 2020 Posted January 22, 2020 (edited) Is spanning tree configured correctly. I'm going to sound like I know more than I actually do here but our HP switches have a setting called Configuration Revision Level and we are using MSTP protocol. We currently have a flat network and all switches have to have the same number entered here. Find out what number your core switch is set as and then enter that into your edge switches. This helped us a great deal but I did get some help from one of our suppliers with this. Also, are you using the default lock screen/desktop wallpaper or a custom one. I heard that Windows 10 can do this silly thing where each PC will keep going out to the internet to download the default wallpaper and cause issues. Edited January 22, 2020 by jcs808
mdrabble Posted January 23, 2020 Author Posted January 23, 2020 Yep, spanning tree all using the same settings. Still scratching my head on this and everything appears to be working fine. The irritating issue is how slow outlook has become. - hit send and receive and it pops up not responding, screen turns white and then suddenly springs back into life. Going to reboot all switches and servers at the end of the school day to see if that cure it. I have asked out ISP to do a line check but I cannot see that being the issue as the slowdown seems to non internet based applications.
bknaggs Posted January 23, 2020 Posted January 23, 2020 The irritating issue is how slow outlook has become. - hit send and receive and it pops up not responding, screen turns white and then suddenly springs back into life. Which Exchange/Outlook combination are you running? This is something that has been affecting people here for about six weeks that I've not managed to spot a pattern to yet.
mdrabble Posted January 23, 2020 Author Posted January 23, 2020 (edited) Which Exchange/Outlook combination are you running? This is something that has been affecting people here for about six weeks that I've not managed to spot a pattern to yet. Office 2016 and Office 365 with redirected Appdata folders - which can cause some slow downs but this have been fine for nearly 12 months. Outlook is just one of the programs that are affected but the main one that is noticeable due to it being used by the majority of people. Powerpoint/Word can become not responding before being fine again and all they were doing is typing. As I said - all fine before Christmas and first week back and then suddenly hit with this issue. I am wondering if it could be an Office update causing it as some updates were applied towards the end of December. Edited January 23, 2020 by mdrabble
WorksOnMyPC Posted January 23, 2020 Posted January 23, 2020 Have you used wireshark to look for nasty packets or a flood of data coming from a unknown device?
mdrabble Posted January 23, 2020 Author Posted January 23, 2020 Have you used wireshark to look for nasty packets or a flood of data coming from a unknown device? Didnt think of that! Will give that a go now
WorksOnMyPC Posted January 23, 2020 Posted January 23, 2020 Hope you find something, my only other suggestion would be proc mon and watch for the read/write times and watch for a pattern. But that would be fun...
RobD Posted January 23, 2020 Posted January 23, 2020 Test the network itself by running iperf: iPerf | Tech Blog That way you could potentially narrow the issue down. Also I've had issues in the past with indexing on the file servers.
dcwhitworth Posted January 23, 2020 Posted January 23, 2020 I'd be tempted to try the reboot route you are planning on, servers, switches, routers, gateways, anything you think could be involved. We've had a very occasional issue where things have run dog slow and rebooting the core switch has cured it.
synaesthesia Posted January 23, 2020 Posted January 23, 2020 I'd be tempted to try the reboot route you are planning on, servers, switches, routers, gateways, anything you think could be involved. We've had a very occasional issue where things have run dog slow and rebooting the core switch has cured it. This, but be wary that the reboot will have only cured the/a symptom and not the cause, but will give you a clue as to where to start looking for the cause.
fordea Posted January 24, 2020 Posted January 24, 2020 Bit of a shot in the dark but have you setup any scheduled Wake on LAN software recently?
mdrabble Posted January 24, 2020 Author Posted January 24, 2020 Bit of a shot in the dark but have you setup any scheduled Wake on LAN software recently? I use Impero to wake on lan and not had any issues.
mdrabble Posted January 24, 2020 Author Posted January 24, 2020 I contacted our ISP to check the connection just incase that was the issue as speedtests were shocking low - anything from 5mbps to 30mbps on a 300MB connection. They have replied back this morning and reported that the Fiber Line Provider resolved an issue on our line. Speed tests now showing sensible speeds again - so I have no idea if that could have caused the issue. If it did then I am puzzled as to why affected apps such as Word/PowerPoint when they were using files stored on the on-premise file server. Will wait to hear from staff if they are still having issues.
synaesthesia Posted January 24, 2020 Posted January 24, 2020 Check to make sure internal clients only have your internal server(s) for DNS resolution.
mdrabble Posted January 24, 2020 Author Posted January 24, 2020 Check to make sure internal clients only have your internal server(s) for DNS resolution. DNS set via DCHP to install servers I supposed anyone on BYOD devices could set different DNS settings manually but not many people connected to BYOD at the moment due to speeds issues and it faster for them to use their own data.
fordea Posted January 24, 2020 Posted January 24, 2020 Does your Impero power-on schedule attempt to power on your computers throughout the whole school day or just once in the morning?
mdrabble Posted January 24, 2020 Author Posted January 24, 2020 Does your Impero power-on schedule attempt to power on your computers throughout the whole school day or just once in the morning? Just the mornings. Nothing has changed on the network since October so not sure why it has suddenly started.
Disease Posted January 24, 2020 Posted January 24, 2020 We had a similar issue to this a number of years ago, after 2 weeks we manged to track it down to our AV which had switched from local scanning to central scanning. Every machine sent every file accessed to the AV VM for scanning and used up all the IOPS bringing all the VMS to a crawl.
dcwhitworth Posted January 24, 2020 Posted January 24, 2020 Looking at this again it seems remarkably similar to an issue we had a couple of time where permissions on the home area share got messed up. Symptoms were that Office apps took an absolute age to open. Sounds a little similar.
mdrabble Posted January 24, 2020 Author Posted January 24, 2020 Well either the reboot of servers and switches or the issue fixed by our isp seems have resolved the issues as I’ve had no reported issues today. Fingers crossed all will be ok on Monday
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