SBS 2008 and Excel

[454697819]

I am opening this up to the experts on .org as I am at my wits end with my IT support company, they will find their contract shortened in due course.

We had a new server installed the other week, it should have been a straight forward migration but it all went wrong and we ended up with a new domain,

All the computers were extracted from the old domain, given new profiles put in the new domain and mostly it has been ok.

However we have some serious issues with the transfer of excel files across the network, with slow, stuttery performance with items taken ages to save and ages to open, it happens on both XP & 7 machines but we only run 2007 office.

Small files still take a while but large files take proportionality longer, as we use excel a lot its giving a lot of people a headache, and I look like a Muppet for sorting a new server which is slower.

Does anyone have ANY idea what could be causing it?

Cheers

Alex


ps.. and no I shouldn't have ought a dell or a MAC.

[pookie]

I had this with some wind 7 boxes

http://www.windowsreference.com/windows-7/slow-network-file-copy-issues-in-windows-7-caused-by-remote-differential-compression/

Try the remote compression off first.

Also have experienced this with the tcp offload on the network card on hp servers that needs to be turned off

[collis]

check the folder paths,
longer than 8 levels deep and performance reduces.
Also check the number of characters in the filename as if it's greater than 256 it will cause problems.
Basically it's all to do with indexing, to test, create a drive map straight to a folder with an excel file in, if the spreadsheet loads in seconds that is the cause.

[BigBaddad]

Have you tried turning it off for 10 seconds then turning back on?

[fizzwheel]

Are the server & the client machine in the same domain ?

Are the server & client machine on the same physical network ?

As above, check indexing is turned on and that file / folder compression is turned off as that effects performance.

A quick check would be to install excel onto the server and then open the file up on the server itself, so that would eliminate the physical network from the equation. Not best practise to do this mind, but it'd give you an idea of where the fault is.

Any errors in the event log of either the server or client PC's

Could also be a DNS problem in that its taking the client machines a while to resolve the servers IP name in DNS

Is it just spreadsheets or is this effecting every file you try and open ? How big are the spreadsheets you are trying to open / manipulate.

Your other option is to copy the spreadsheet onto the local disk on one of the client PC's and then open it up that way. If the copy takes ages, but then it opens up immedialty once on the client PC then you've got some kind of server / infrastructure problem.

I'm guessing this wasnt a problem on your old server and its only occured since you transfered your data across ?

Whats been done so far in order to try and solve the fault you have ?

[454697819]

Are the server & the client machine in the same domain ? Yes

Are the server & client machine on the same physical network ? Yes

As above, check indexing is turned on and that file / folder compression is turned off as that effects performance. Indexing is turned off, will check compression

A quick check would be to install excel onto the server and then open the file up on the server itself, so that would eliminate the physical network from the equation. Not best practise to do this mind, but it'd give you an idea of where the fault is. Have eliminated physical network through other means

Any errors in the event log of either the server or client PC's No

Could also be a DNS problem in that its taking the client machines a while to resolve the servers IP name in DNS - The machine is loged onto the network all day and everything else works ok, not had any other DNS issues

Is it just spreadsheets or is this effecting every file you try and open ? How big are the spreadsheets you are trying to open / manipulate. Spread sheets only but also slow in swapping network printers each in any program, spread sheets vary from 100k to 50 meg

Your other option is to copy the spreadsheet onto the local disk on one of the client PC's and then open it up that way. If the copy takes ages, but then it opens up immedialty once on the client PC then you've got some kind of server / infrastructure problem. The severe issues I have highlighted as corrupt documents i.e when copied to C: it still takes a long time but is made worse when on the network, annoyingly this file was fine when using SBS 2003

I'm guessing this wasnt a problem on your old server and its only occured since you transfered your data across ? Correct, hence my frustration

Whats been done so far in order to try and solve the fault you have ?

I have eliminated the laptop as at fault, tried local opening on several machines, the local cache has been refreshed as all of the files on the computers are sync'd using off line files, although the sync has been eliminated as the issue but stopping off line files and clearing the cache,

All machines running office 2007 with SP2,

I have swapped the switch to gigabit, I have eliminated internal wiring, as for the server side I am not sure exactly as this why I am frustrated as they keep going... "errr uhmm yeah sure.. were looking into it"

I am looking for suggestions to take to them,

It may be an issue with UNC paths however that would normally reflect in all programs and the issue is present across small UNC and the longest UNC we have.

any suggestions are welcome.

[davepreston]

i would comment with some funny remarks but it would bring up the whole dangerous dave thing again ;)

[TSM]

i remember ages ago there used to be a problem in SBS that caused slow network transfer, the setting was somthing about 'certificate sign SMB requests'
its been ages but i know it upped our transfers by min 5x, nowerdays i dont use msft servers