Very slow editing doc loaded from network share

[Graham Wideman [Visio MVP]]

Folks:

I am encountering a situation where editing a Word doc which is loaded from
a network share is extremely slow, whereas editing the same doc copied to a
local drive is fast -- and for none of the simple reasons I guessed.

More clues:

-- Word 2003 SP2
-- Doc is about 500 K, and contains a large table about 10 columns wide and
8 pages long.

Example slowness: move the table column width adjuster. On the local doc the
reformat occurs immediately, on the network doc it takes seconds.

Now the interesting clue:

With FileMon I can see that in the case of the network doc, Word is doing an
extensive amount of reading of little pieces of data from the file,
constantly, and especially during this kind of edit. In the case of the
local doc, Word seems to load the whole thing and rarely interact with the
disk.

Presumably, all that excessive file reading is slowing Word down.

I've even tried to fool Word by setting up a mapping to the shared net drive
(so it's now "drive X"), but no dice, same problem.

Can't for the life of me think why the behaviour would be different in one
case vs the other, or what option might impact this.

Any ideas?

Graham

 

[John McGhie [MVP - Word and Word Macintosh]]

Hi Graham:

Go to Tools>Options>Save and ensure that "Always make backup copy" is set to
"ON" and "Allow fast saves" is set to OFF.

It should be set that way by default, but often it isn't. Word should sense
the presence of the network and flip those switches automatically, but it's
possible that this is not happening in your case.

Word *does* make a large number of small accesses to a file when operating:
that's a legacy of its "streaming" file access method. When you have a
large table, the document complexity goes up. If you have "Always make
backup copy" switched OFF, Word is holding the TEMP version of the original
file open in "Append" mode, and appending each change to the bottom of the
file. It also holds a growing number of temporary files open, supporting
the "Undo" ability. At some point, the network file server is not going to
like this

By switching to "Always make backup", Word writes its backup file in Serial
mode instead of Append mode (Open, Write instead of Open, Append). It then
stacks the Undo changes in separate temporary files held locally. This will
reduce network traffic sharply.

Hope this helps

Folks:

I am encountering a situation where editing a Word doc which is loaded from
a network share is extremely slow, whereas editing the same doc copied to a
local drive is fast -- and for none of the simple reasons I guessed.

More clues:

-- Word 2003 SP2
-- Doc is about 500 K, and contains a large table about 10 columns wide and
8 pages long.

Example slowness: move the table column width adjuster. On the local doc the
reformat occurs immediately, on the network doc it takes seconds.

Now the interesting clue:

With FileMon I can see that in the case of the network doc, Word is doing an
extensive amount of reading of little pieces of data from the file,
constantly, and especially during this kind of edit. In the case of the
local doc, Word seems to load the whole thing and rarely interact with the
disk.

Presumably, all that excessive file reading is slowing Word down.

I've even tried to fool Word by setting up a mapping to the shared net drive
(so it's now "drive X"), but no dice, same problem.

Can't for the life of me think why the behaviour would be different in one
case vs the other, or what option might impact this.

Any ideas?

Graham

--

Please reply to the newsgroup to maintain the thread. Please do not email
me unless I ask you to.

John McGhie <[email protected]>
Microsoft MVP, Word and Word for Macintosh. Consultant Technical Writer
Sydney, Australia +61 (0) 4 1209 1410

 

[Graham Wideman [Visio MVP]]

Wow -- John' s almost the man this evening! (If we ever cross paths at MVP
conf, one beer on me!)

OK, so I did as you suggested and that seemed to make no difference. Same
slowness, and that observation backed up with watching activity in Filemon.

I tried various combos of those settings (also "Allow background saves") and
didn't hit a good one. I also tried quitting and restarting Word each time
in case this was a setting that takes effect only on start up.

Then I noticed the "Make local copy of files stored on network". That one
*did* have the desired result, including very low disk activity.

So, I'm happy to have *a* way to proceed, but would also be open to further
theories on how to do it better.

Thanks for the very speedy and somewhere-near-the-bullseye reply!

Graham

 

[John McGhie [MVP - Word and Word Macintosh]]

{Blush} Sorry, I forgot about that one, sorry!

Wow -- John' s almost the man this evening! (If we ever cross paths at MVP
conf, one beer on me!)

OK, so I did as you suggested and that seemed to make no difference. Same
slowness, and that observation backed up with watching activity in Filemon.

I tried various combos of those settings (also "Allow background saves") and
didn't hit a good one. I also tried quitting and restarting Word each time
in case this was a setting that takes effect only on start up.

Then I noticed the "Make local copy of files stored on network". That one
*did* have the desired result, including very low disk activity.

So, I'm happy to have *a* way to proceed, but would also be open to further
theories on how to do it better.

Thanks for the very speedy and somewhere-near-the-bullseye reply!

Graham

--

Please reply to the newsgroup to maintain the thread. Please do not email
me unless I ask you to.

John McGhie <[email protected]>
Microsoft MVP, Word and Word for Macintosh. Consultant Technical Writer
Sydney, Australia +61 (0) 4 1209 1410