Hi all,
A bit of a long post here I’m afraid but I wanted to give all the information!
At work we run a DOS-based business critical application. It is essentially a collection of flat files that looks at dat files for information. The application is hosted on a Windows 2003 Server, and it is accessed via mapped network drives by people in the same building, and via terminal services by people at other sites.
When everyone came into work Wednesday morning it was running excessively slow, which eventually led us to down the server for nearly two and a half hours. The company who provide and support the application were adamant that the problem must be with our servers, although I have since heard that at least one other company running it was experiencing the same problem.
We still have the same problem, and it breaks down like this:
1. Accessing from terminal services is not slow, nor does the application run slower than usual.
2. Accessing via mapped drives (even when directly on the server running the application) is extremely slow.
3. Accessing the application locally using local folders rather than mapped drives speeds up the application to its’ normal speed.
Because of the above symptoms, we assumed that the problem lay in the network connection (read and write) to the mapped drives. In order to try and solve this we did the following (it was a long night!):
1. Failed over to a different server (using Double Take)
2. Uninstalled windows updates applied the previous day
3. Tried each network card on its own and teamed
4. Checked the switch (which sits about three foot from the server in question)
5. Updated the NIC drivers
6. Bypassed DNS name resolving by mapping to IP rather than host names
7. Removed and rejoined the server from the domain
At this point we’re stuck in a Googling frenzy, and would appreciate any help!
Many Thanks,
Chris
