network slowdown

yes, 10 users for peer-to-peer is the recommended maximum. and yes, if all 20 can work in that situatiojn, it will be EXTREMELY sluggish.

Screensavers cause individual workstations to slow down... because it takes resources to paint those screens. Because you are PTP, this will not help your network.

I don't agree! I am the Admin for a 250 node workgroup(God help me :). Having a large workgroup will NOT affect bandwidth. Actually, our bandwidth is just fine. Screensavers will not affect it either unless they are being run on a network share/home directory. Downloading screensavers from a site like Webshots may obviously affect bandwidth. Poor me! 250 node workgroup.... heh!

The usual limit of ten clients on a peer-to-peer network is not because of loading, it's because products like NT Workstation only accept ten simultaneous connections. But if the network is primarily used for printing and some low volume of file sharing, you won't have problems with that limit.

That having been said, whether a peer-to-peer network is sluggish depends on what is traveling across it and whether the workstations themselves can keep up with it. If you think about it, it doesn't matter to the network whether a file is being transferred from one workstation to another or from a server to a workstation - the amount of packets is the same.

The bigger issue is the speed of the network itself (10 vs 100) and whether you're using hubs (half-duplex) or switches (full-duplex).

As far as screensavers, they usually only affect the workstation itself. BUT... if you have a workstation that is using all its CPU cycles to run the screensaver, it will respond slowly to network requests and the users will perceive "the network" to be slow whenever they try to access that workstation while the screensave is active.

paul

All answers above had correct suggestions. But I see NETWORK bottleneck solutin in: 1. Useing SWITCHES vs. HUBS. 2. Selecting correct network protocol.

1. If you use hub, all your workstations talk to media all-at-once. And you have collisions. If you use switch it gives traffic form source only to workstation which is destination.

2. Your workstations sends broadcasts which all another workstations listen and process. If you select correct protocol you can decrease overhead for all workstations. For example, if your network does not have access to Internet - use NetBEUI or IPX because it's faster than TCP/IP (because in case of TCP/IP workstations require to use broadcasts to get workstations names and use ARP to get MAC address of neighbor and it creates additional traffic). If you have to use TCP/IP - at least create "lmhosts" file on every machine.

Good luck.

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