Vista Network Performance... again.

[John]

Good Day, folks.

I am curious if anyone would have any suggestions regarding the poor
network performance under Windows Vista Business. Before I get into
the crux of the issue, I'll briefly describe my setup.

Machine 1 - Windows Vista Business.
Machine 2 - Windows XP Professional.
Machine 3 - FreeBSD 6.2-Stable Workstation.
Machine 4 - FreeBSD 6.2-Stable Server.

The server houses a 2.5TB RAID 5 array with a 3Ware hardware-based RAID
controller. All of the machines have at least 2GB RAM, C2D processors and
gigabit Ethernet. The router/switch is gigabit capable, although it does
not support jumbo Ethernet frames.

The basic issue is that transfers from, or to, the Vista machine are
typically 75% less than any of the other machines:

Server <-> XP or the workstation yields approx. 35MB/sec to 55MB/sec.
Server <-> Vista yields approx. 4MB/sec to 12MB/sec.

This is not a machine specific issue as I've installed FreeBSD for testing
purposes on the machine that Vista is currently installed on and network
performance was as expected with an average of 50MB/sec on the same hardware.

I've tried a number of suggestions as per numerous websites, as well as
these newsgroups. Some of these suggestions include:

- Disabling Remote Differential Compression.
- Disabling TCP Autotuning.
- Installing Hotfix KB931770.
- Disabling Indexing.
- Updating the NIC drivers to the latest available.

Although the above did increase throughput by about 1-2MB/sec, this
is still rather unacceptable. I tend to find it rather hard to believe
that an issue such as this is still present months after the general
release of Vista, and one that is rather widespread based on various
newsgroups and web-based forums.

I am really hoping that someone could provide suggestions that would
remedy this issue. I routinely push multi-gigabyte files to and from
the server from this machine, and this performance issue is getting
painful to deal with.

Any help and/or suggestions would be most appreciated.

 

[James Matthews]

Seeing as you have tested it on both machines try disabling the firewall!

 

[John]

The performance monitors in Vista will automatically ajust every type of
data transfer and if theres not enough for a program to work with it
will slow the extra non system stuff right down...there might be some
help here (link) 'How to Fix Windows Vista Slow Network Transfer ?
ADS-Links.com Internet Marketing - Ian Lee' (http://tinyurl.com/yq32c8)

Thaks for the link, but unfortunately, none of that either applies or has
already been attempted. The fact of the matter is that Vista is degrading
my network throughput by, in most cases, over 75%. This is absolutely
unacceptable.

I routinely push ~25-30GB of data to and from the server daily. I do a lot
of video encoding with this machine, and the abysmal transfer rates have
a large impact on my application.

There is a few other windows options to try if its really essential but
a more simple way is just to use a ftp server.

This isn't really much of an option, as the application that I utilize
doesn't support FTP transfers. On the server side, Samba is being utilized
to provide share access to the RAID volume for the Windows clients. A
drive letter is simply mapped to this share on the server and my application
goes about its' business with that mapping. Trying to hack in the use of
FTP into the workflow adds unnecessary manual intervention and won't solve
the network issues.

One thing that does strike me as odd, and perhaps is a start into trying
to get this resolved; I attempted to copy a few files from the Vista machine
to the server from a command prompt using `xcopy`. Transfer rates peaked
at about 18MB/sec for large file copies to the server. When attempting to do
the same from Explorer, transfers again dropped to about 6MB/sec. There is
some really odd stuff going on with Vista. When I tried to do the same thing
from a command prompt using `robocopy`, transfer rates also dropped to about
7-8MB/sec.

Thanks for the link and the suggestions. It was appreciated.

 

[John]

Seeing as you have tested it on both machines try disabling the firewall!

All of the machines on the network are firewalled at the router. None
are firewalled locally. None of the machines, except the Vista machine,
are experiencing throughput issues. It's not a firewall issue.

Thanks for the suggestion, however. It was appreciated.

 

[Not Me]

did you enable/disable IPV6?