Poor Virtual Drive Performance

MadFlava

Limp Gawd
Joined
Apr 23, 2000
Messages
428
I just built a file server that's connected to my network via gigabit ethernet. My main PC is also gigabit connected and the other PCs on the network are either wireless or plain 10/100. The wired PCs are going through a gigabit switch as well.

The problem Im having is that I have 2 of the drives mounted on my main PC as virtual drives but the performance is pretty crappy. Now granted the machine is not a powerhouse (Celeron 667 with 256MB of RAM running Windows XP) but the machine has no processes running whatsoever so I'd think the PC would be adequate.

The storage in the server is a 500GB RAID 0 partition through an Adaptec 1200A RAID card and a single 250GB drive connected through a Maxtor add in IDE card. The problems mainly appear to be on the RAID drive. It takes forever to open it across the network but it opens relatively quickly via remote desktop. The RAID has 2 folders on it that has approximately 1500 sub folders each. I guess I could split it up some more but it seems like if it opens quickly via remote desktop it should open just as quick over the network as a virtual drive.

Anyone got any suggestions?
 
I guess your talking about mapped drives when you say virtual drives? And browsing the mapped drives over the network?

Also, with remote desktop your opening the drive as if your on the server itself so that is completely irrelevant to network browsing issues.

Define "forever" and when doing so, how do file transfers do once you get to the network resource? What about FTP'ing. Try setting up an FTP server on the server or even a webserver and see how browsing and file transfer are through those methods.
 
By "forever", I mean taking up to 30 seconds to open the folder, explorer just "hanging" for no reason when you're browsing the folder. Once things are open, file copying is quick, as quick as it would be if the drives were in my own PC.

The remote desktop comment was basically to show that it's not a hardware issue (I dont think).

Interestingly enough, I also have another network drive in this machine that doesn't exhibit this behavior so I'm wondering if it's the fact that the drive giving me so much grief has so many subfolders within 2 directories that's giving me trouble.
 
Sounds like the slowness is in enumerating the 1500 subfolders across the network. Break them up into much smaller bites and see what happens....
 
Ill give that a try. I had actually thought about doing that but never got around to it.
 
Just deleted those two reg keys.. we'll see if it makes any difference.

Splitting the directories up into smaller chunks had no effect, unfortunately. While copying, etc is MUCH quicker via gigabit, file browsing, etc really isn't and that's kind of disappointing. It was really what I was hoping to gain by switching my wired network over to gigabit.
 
Nope.. deleting those keys on both machines didnt really help.

I've also tried moving the swap file to a faster drive in case it was swap access related. At this point, I'm kind of stumped. I probably should have done a linux install and used Samba instead but unfortunately some of the hardware Im using isnt supported in linux :(
 
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