XP / Office 2007 files write extremely slow to network share (2 mi

[jimbo189]

My dept recently moved our shared drive from a dated Snap Appliance to an
Apple Xserve Raid (OSX 10.4 / Samba 3). We have mostly XP clients running
Office 2007 Professional, and Symantec Endpoint 11 by requirement.

Since the switch our clients are experiencing very slow save times to the
network share (1-2 minutes, sometimes +), specifically when files are opened,
edited and saved directly on the share. This was not the norm before the
switch.

We've found the following while investigating:

A) On XP clients: Office 2007 files opened, edited and saved directly on
share may take up to 2 minutes to finish saving rendering the desktop
more-or-less unusable until the process completes.

B) On XP clients: OpenOffice files save instantly when opened, edited and
saved directly on the share.

C) On Macs: files save instantly when opened, edited and saved directly on
the share using Office for Mac.


Troubleshooting I've tried already:

1. Disabling and completely uninstalling Symantec on the XP client.

2. Verified there are no non-existent shares still lingering in My Network
Places.

3. Had my server admin try disabling oplocks on the server.

4. Tried disabling oplocks on the XP client.


Staff are encouraged to edit and save locally before copying to network
share but they're not accustomed to doing this and the save times seem
exorbitant in any event.

We can't seem to find any clear component to pursue. Any ideas, thoughts or
suggestions would be appreciated.

Thanks in advance,

Jim

 

[Steve Rindsberg]

Jim,

One thing you might try is the Sysinternals (now MS) disk monitoring/file
monitoring utilities and perhaps some of their others (network traffic, for
example).

It might be worth monitoring file activity while doing a save from one of the
problem PCs.

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb545046.aspx