slowness of project over wan connection

[Aubrey]

Recently, my company acquired another company and we have added their users
tot he project server. We are located in Atlanta while they are located in
chicago. We are on two different domains but there is an established trust.
They have been having issues with the project sharepoitn sites. The issues
appear to be intermittent but they will get errors such as "web server busy"
when trying to upload files big or small. Project itself can also be very
slow for them. We have searched for network issues that could be related but
have found nothing. Has anyone else had this kind of problem? If so what was
your solution?
Thanks!

 

[Rick Roszko]

Hi,

There are a lot of questions that need to be answered.

(1) How big is your WAN? T1? Multiple T1 lines? etc.
(2) # of users in Atlanta?
(3) # of users in Chicago?
(4) # of projects on the server?
(5) # of resources on the server?
(6) How many servers? RAM? Processors?

Is your server(s) pegged or is your network pegged? Find that
out first. If your servers are sitting at 10% CPU time but 99%
network traffic, you need to do something on the net.

How many servers do you have? One IIS and one SQL? Is
the connection between the servers 10/100 or 1000? Are the
NICs full-duplexed? Is the traffic clog between the Project
Server (IIS) and SQL server or the outside world to the
Project Server?

Is there excessive page swapping? You need more RAM.

Okay, let's say you have adequate processor power, RAM
to spare but the NICs are pegged. (Now, NICs can be pegged
if you don't have processor power, RAM etc, so make sure
you look across all variables simultaneously!)

Let's say your servers are good to go...

One solution for slow response is to install a Terminal Services server
in the same location as the Project Server. Note: I don't mean load
load Terminal Services onto the Project Server itself, I mean get
another server and just load Terminal Services on that. Users will
connect via TS and attach to project Server. You will need to
buy TS licenses per concurrent user, of course.

Or, get a bigger WAN pipe. You will need to do cost analysis on
this of course. How many (concurrent) users? TS may be less
expensive. "Concurrent" means that even if you have say 1000 users,
only 50 at any time uses the server, that's 50 concurrent users.

Hope that wasn't too confusing...

Rick

 

[Rod Gill]

As an add on to the good advice Rick gave, consider that Project Server 2007
has caching built in. This makes Project perform much faster over a WAN to
the extent that you don't need Terminal Services in most cases.

I think Microsoft recommend that Terminal Services be used for Project
Server 2003 when the latency gets past 50mS. SO there is another measure for
you,