SLOW file copy?

[Calab]

I have a gigabit LAN here. My machine is running Win XP Pro SP2. The other
machine is running Windows 2003 R2 Server.

Source drive is a 320gig Seagate SATA drive on the onboard nVidia SATA
controller. It's running in 3gig mode.

Target drive is actually a RAID5 array. Five 500gig SATA hard drives with
lots of space to spare.

When I copy a large file (4+ gig) the network utilization is less than THREE
percent. This works out to about 30mbit/second or about 3.8mbyte/second.
Performance is MUCH worse when transferring small files.

I just downloaded NetCPS and tested the throughput of my LAN directly and
utilization tops out at about 60%. This works out to 600mbit/second or
75mbyte/second.

Where is all the performance being lost????

 

[Bob Willard]

I have a gigabit LAN here. My machine is running Win XP Pro SP2. The other
machine is running Windows 2003 R2 Server.

Source drive is a 320gig Seagate SATA drive on the onboard nVidia SATA
controller. It's running in 3gig mode.

Target drive is actually a RAID5 array. Five 500gig SATA hard drives with
lots of space to spare.

When I copy a large file (4+ gig) the network utilization is less than THREE
percent. This works out to about 30mbit/second or about 3.8mbyte/second.
Performance is MUCH worse when transferring small files.

I just downloaded NetCPS and tested the throughput of my LAN directly and
utilization tops out at about 60%. This works out to 600mbit/second or
75mbyte/second.

Where is all the performance being lost????

A couple of interesting experiments come to mind:
1.Change the target to a single HD, directly connected to your
server (i.e., not via the RAID controller)
2.Replace the GbE switch with a direct LAN cable
3.Uninstall all of the firewall and AV apps in the client and
in the server