files in server share affecting speed of login?

[featured_spectre]

I have a user who had a 128mb video file in his shared area for media studies...I wanted to test a theory I had.

 

Media students always seemed to take the longest to log in, and my theory was due to the file size in the server shares. It took (and I timed it with a stop watch) between 49 seconds and 73 seconds for a user to log on (sole user on the network).

 

I took out his large files from his share, it dropped to between 10-18 seconds.

 

When this is across a whole class of media students, you can imagine the log in times! Anyone have any clue as to why this could be?

 

I am running a suite of W7 machines (over wireless using Ruckus Wireless), and server 2008R2. Bare in mind that a cabled connection using Cat5e was no different in terms of speed (however Cat6 was like lightning!).

[srochford]

Is it creating/updating thumbnails as the user logs in? No idea why it should be but I know the thumbnailing can slow things down.

 

Going from cat5 to cat6 shouldn't make any difference if the switches are the same (but if your cat6 is gigabit compared to 100Mbit on the cat5 then that's the significant difference!)

[SYNACK]

I'm sure you are but have to check, you are using redirected documents or mapped drives right.

 

Have you tried looking through the eventlog as this is vastly better under 7 for clues. Also have you tried without the AV on, perhaps it is scanning before allowing access.

[featured_spectre]

AV is set to scan at 4pm every day (along with malware bytes etc) and then it shuts down. We had 10/100/1000 switches so Cat6 does make a difference compared to CAT5e.

 

I am using redirected my documents, however it does not pull anything from C:\ as that clogs it down.

Edited March 16, 2010 by featured_spectre