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excessive SMB traffic

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by shooten2

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I've been experiencing, at seemingly random times, massive slowdowns on my Server 2003 machine (to the point that all I can do is reboot the server). I've finally figured out that during those slowdowns, there's an excessive amount of SMB traffic between the server and my desktop pc. When it's running normally, I don't see that SMB traffic. I'm still trying to figure out all the info that wireshark gives me, but does anyone know what might cause the sudden increase in SMB traffic?

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by robo_dev

Some of it is normal, such as when PCs log on or log off, you will see SMB updating it's browser lists or other mundane tasks.

The thing that will kill performance is traffic that goes nowhere....so if there are mapped drives that no longer exist, server names that no longer exist, or printers that no longer exist, SMB will do an awful lot of talking and sqwawking.

Even worse if there are mistakes in the topology such as duplicate SMB names or multiple routes to one host, then SMB does not play well on the network.

Look closely at the Wireshark SMB packets and see what they are doing...you can see what the protocol is trying to do, and you can spot the error.

this is a wild guess, but there was a microsoft patch for XP regarding excessive smb traffic
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/330929

by shooten2

Thank you for your response - after digging deeper into the wireshark reports, I was able to figure out what was causing the extra traffic and solve the problem.

by joshricker

what was the fix that you found using wireshark? We have excessive SMB traffic that we can't figure out.
Thanks

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