We are transitioning to some Web-based applications, I am from a traditional client-server environment; and I am the network admin [AIX & Windows]. I’m concerned that this recent problem could cause a serious customer-interaction problem in the future and I would like to learn what to do!
Two days ago we were having some ISP-related connection problems and 3 users out of 25 had special trouble: They said “the internet is very slow”. My observation was that their computers were very slow: (all desktops w/ WinXP and IE 7, but different hardware configs) with more than 1 tab active and msn.com in one tab, the 3 systems were so slow as if to be unusable. It was like something wouldn’t load in the msn window and it caused the page file usage to peak, which seemed to cause cpu usage to max, too.
I compared configs, checked for missing or improperly applied updates, different browser add-ins, scanned for malware, adware, virii, etc. and spent several hours to come to the conclusion that I couldn’t find anything wrong (but the symptoms were still there and repeatable). Other systems were working normally during this time. The next morning, with no further changes on my part, everything was completly normal on every system.
My question: can anyone point me somewhere to learn how to tell what I missed? My network hardware (firewall, router, switch) is currently under review; would a “managed” switch have been able to give me any more info to show where the trouble might be?
Thanks for any help you can give.
