Hi all!
I have struggled a while with low throughput from my WHS system. The system consists of two WDC 1TB green drives. The network is cabled gigabit and gigabit switch/router. Using Ixia, I found that the throughput is 888,890Mbps. According to Ixia, Ixia's IxChariot can create throughput at up to 940 Mbps on a Gb Ethernet LAN. It seems that the network should be fast enough.
Nevertheless, I have noticed that file copy from my WHS is slow. I work with big photo files (Nikons NEF raw format, more than 10MB files), and browsing folder s with over 1000 of them could be slow. Copying a 683MB zip file takes approximately 20 seconds.
Then I faced some problem with my NIS 2009 security suite, and needed to uninstall/reinstall the NIS2010 version. After uninstalling/reboot, I needed another zip file from my WHS system. Surprisingly, the copying speed was very fast. I repeated the copying and clocked it to approximately 12 seconds!
I now realized that NIS slowed down the transfer with a large amount. I then set up a test consisting off:
A ISO file, size 281MB
A ZIP file, size 683MB
A folder, 698MB (Consist 66 NEF files)
Then I start clocking the transfer speeds, performing the same copying two times.
Without NIS:
Iso test 1 2,6 seconds
Iso test 2 3,5 seconds
zip test 1 12,9 seconds (over 109 MB/s throughput)
zip test 2 11,9 seconds
Folder test 1 15 seconds
Folder test 2 11,5 seconds
With NIS 2010:
Iso test 1 9,4 seconds
Iso test 2 6,5 seconds
Zip test 1 25 seconds
Zip test 2 24 seconds
Folder test 1 40 seconds
Folder test 2 40 seconds
I posted my findings in the Norton community forum and one of the participants in the discussion have experienced the same issue and started to investigate the cause for this. He quickly found that Norton’s intrusion protection was the cause for this. The slowdown with NIS/NAV is approximately 30%. Also, copying larger files, the transfer takes randomly pauses and then continues again. After disabling the IDS driver in his 64 bit OS, IDSvia64.sys, the network transfer speed went back to normal. In my 32bit OS, I have the same experience disabling the 32 bit driver, IDSvix86.sys.
I post this in case of anyone else is suffering from bad performance from your server. If you use NIS/NAV 2009/2010 (I have tested all of them), your problem COULD be related to this software. I have used Norton for 10 years and would like to continue do so. But, then Symantec have to fix this issue. A slowdown of 30%+ is not acceptable. Norton users; let Symantec know that you want this issue fixed! Please take a lock at the discussion here: http://community.norton.com/norton/board/message?board.id=nis_feedback&thread.id=76027
Thanks and regards,
Ole Martin
