Very slow file transfer over home network

FrankGrimes

I put a CAT5e network into my house and have a wireless router running DD-wrt connected to my UPC modem. I have some devices wired into the 4 ethernet ports on the router and also have a 10/100 4-port switch with some devices wired into it and it in turn wired into the router.

Here are the devices I have on the network (static IP specified for each in router settings):

1. Media Center PC in living room - wired.
2. Windows Home Server in office beside router - wired.
3. Logitech Squeezebox Duet in kitchen - wired.
4. Xbox 360 - wired.
5. Samsung NC10 laptop - wireless.
6. Dell Laptop - wireless.

The network works fine for general purposes - sharing broadband connection and playing standard-def video files from the server to the Media Center PC (haven't tried this for hi-def video). It is really slow for moving files between any of the 3 PCs (wired or wireless) and the server though. Last night, transferring a load of media files from the Media Center PC to the server was only getting a transfer rate of 5Mb/sec so it took forever.

The server is a Dell PowerEdge basic model with only 1GB RAM - could that be part of the problem or is there a way to adjust the network setup to improve transfer rates for at least the wired connections?

wolfric

do a ping from any of the wireless machines and check for packet loss. (start run cmd "ping -t ip") type the contents of "" in the black box without "" where ip is the ip of another box. Usually found under statistics of your router web interface.

If you're getting packet loss then consider switching wireless channel.
Check the speed of the router and the switch.
Check the hard drive and make sure theres nothing reading and writing off them in the first place. Try a couple copying tests (local and remote) and see if the speed peeks to it's max or close enough.
Control pannel - computer managment. Check both the server and the pc.
It should be in reliability and performance in vista don't know about xp.

Correct me if i'm wrong here but i found that if doing more then 1 task at a time it slows down both processes (of file operations) down more then just 50 50 for both of them so that the combined speed wasn't the total.

Check the hard drive on both them and see what the total speeds are.
http://www.simplisoftware.com/Public/index.php?request=HdTach
http://www.snapfiles.com/get/rkdisk.html
(both of these picked up with a quick google but unchecked so don't blame me for anything that happens)

Make sure there are no errors on the drives (look inside events in ctrl pannel and admin tools) do a chkdsk /f and accept on restart just to make sure. If there are errors it should come up quite frequently in events.

check your network interface on each comp to check speeds.

Make sure other devices aren't taking up the bandwidth on the switch.

It's also possible that one of the computers was doing an update at the time and downloading a bunch of files that could have just slowed it down. Other things to watch out for are anti virus scans and other programs such as google desktop that'll slow it up.

Sorry i can't be more specific

FrankGrimes

Thanks for all those tips wolfric, will look into it in detail over the weekend.

I did the ping test this morning from the wired HTPC in the living room. This was done while I had a big queue of files transferring from the HTPC to the server (at 4Mb/s) so I wouldn't have expected the ping times to be great.

Ping from HTPC to server averaged 16ms over 30 packets with no packet loss, times did fluctuate up as far as 30ms.

Ping from HTPC to router averaged 1ms with no packet loss.

I do notice that when I drag and drop 5 files and then drag and drop another group of 5 files the total transfer time is far above what it would be for just one queue of 10 files so I never use more than one transfer queue at one time.

The harddrives on the server are all listed as Healthy in the Windows Home Server console but I'll run the the tests on both machines to check, really don't think there are harddrive problems though.

This problem has been ongoing for a while regardless of time of day or machine workloads so I'm not sure if there's anything running in the background that could be slowing things down. I don't think my server is doing the constant disk balancing activity that it used to do before the WHS Power Pack update.

What does 'check your network interface on each comp to check speeds.' involve doing?

Thanks.

Diver79

Try checking the properties of your Network cards. Check that they are all running at the appropriate speeds, most likely to be 100mbps, or try setting them to auto negotiate.

Also, check out this very useful article on techrepublic http://articles.techrepublic.com.com/5100-10878_11-5032950.html