I am the CAD AE and am knowledgeable about NT networks (not Novel) and have spent MANY hours of workstation testing in order to find the optimal network settings. I have tested every version of the Novel client to no client. Our company runs Novel v5 for the corporate apps and NT for all of the engineering ?stuff? but all I am really concerned about is the NT side of the network.
We access large assembly data from the CAD system (through dedicated NT servers) and the performance seems to fluctuate so much from month to month.
A typical setup is as follows
1. Workstations are the latest + greatest I.e., Dell Workstations P4 1.5Ghz, 1GB PC800 mem, dual 9GB Ultra 3 LVD, Wildcat Graphics
2. Have NT4.0 SP6a (wkst+srvr)
3. Logon through the Novel client V. 4.8 with file caching off
4. Directly mapped to several NT shares and Novel shares
5. Network setting are as follows. Microsoft is at the top in the network access order, the protocols are Nwlink IPX/SPX, Nwlink Net Bios and TCP6. The nic?s are set to 100/half
7. TCP is set to use DHCP and there is nothing set in the DNS, WINS dialogues.
8. In the bindings area, NWLink IPX/SPX are at the top for all services except the server, which WINS is at the top.
9. The PDC has a gigabit nic and is directly connected to a full duplex gigabit switch via fiber and there are three 100MB hub?s plugged into that switch. So there are users that are plugged into the gigabit switch and the rest are plugged onto the the 100MB hubs
The question is basically this.Is the fact that we are running Novel and Win together that can cause performance issues? Why do we take a 5x-performance hit pulling data off the network as opposed to local? I am looking for any suggestions for the recommended network configuration, sever settings etc. The MIS group says they put a sniffer on the network and never seem to detect anything wrong.
