Very Slow Acces of Data Merged Files Over WAN

[smirc]

I'm a consultant for a company that has two offices in two different
cities. They've got a WAN between them and whenever one office, office
A, tries to access a Word file that references an Excel spreadsheet,
both of which reside at office B, it takes about a half hour or more to
open. Copying individual files is actually quite fast. Opening a non
data merged file from office A that reside in office B is quite fast. I
can't figure out why data merged files take so long.

When these same data merged files are opened locally in office B they
opening almost instantly. So it's got to be something in the
connection, I just can't figure out why other functions over the
network--even within word--are so fast and this is so slow.

Any thoughts or notes on your experiences would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

 

[Elliott Roper]

I'm a consultant for a company that has two offices in two different
cities. They've got a WAN between them and whenever one office, office
A, tries to access a Word file that references an Excel spreadsheet,
both of which reside at office B, it takes about a half hour or more to
open. Copying individual files is actually quite fast. Opening a non
data merged file from office A that reside in office B is quite fast. I
can't figure out why data merged files take so long.

When these same data merged files are opened locally in office B they
opening almost instantly. So it's got to be something in the
connection, I just can't figure out why other functions over the
network--even within word--are so fast and this is so slow.

Any thoughts or notes on your experiences would be greatly appreciated.

A little system design 101
The cost of going over the network for each record to be merged could
be the same order of magnitude of dragging the whole merge file over.
You might have some brain-damaged piece of network software [1] that is
slowly setting up and tearing down the link for each record. So if you
have 1000 records in the merge file, it will approach 1000 times slower
as the set up time becomes large compared to the actual useful transfer
time.

Have your network people do a tcptrace to test the theory.

1. It could even be Office itself. It might choose to do that to avoid
leaving the merge file locked against other users while you slowly
print the merges.