Northcountrystan

Folks, Thanks for the input. We are working on this issue this week. Frankly, looking at 1% cpu and disk storage that is about as fast as you can buy, with an underutilized network, I'm ready to move on to something other then Microsoft. I run an IBM Mainframe on a single DSL line and have great response time. My websites run fine on this particular DSL line. Linux is looking much better to me lately. I appreciate the help and will report back when and if I have resolution. My bottom line: Microsoft software sucks.

Thanks for the input. I'll download the microsoft tools you suggested and install them. As to fractional T-1 lines, that is out of the question as I'm in a rural area and would have to bring in the connection from over 80 miles away. My only choices are roadrunner (which we are replacing) and DSL. Our speeds have been tested at over 750/3000. What is troubling to me is that I have stellar performance on my websites yet I can't use Front Page because its performance is zero. The performance on roadrunner is the same and have paid to have 3/4 meg up and 3 meg down which tested out fine. The reason we are moving to DSL is to maintain 24x7 100% uptime (as close as possible). My office is on UPS and generator backup, but when power is out in the area, cable is out. DSL stays up. From a hardware perspective, I can't believe there is an issue. My cpu utilization is 1 percent (not a typo) and my DASD performance is almost a terabyte per second (raid-10 with two sides of 6 striped 160meg / 15000 rpm drives). I think it would be very hard for me to find a faster hardware platform then I have. I hope that the monitoring tools you recommend will shed light on the problem. BTW, although this is in a real estate office, my background is over 37 years of data processing in all aspects including owning a consulting company. My problem is that I have 37 years in IBM mainframe computing, and this Windows stuff drives me nuts. To me the software is illogical and clugey, but it what I have and need to make it work. Thanks for your input and I'll be trying out the software you recommended. If you have any other ideas, please let me know.

Thanks. I'll pass this on to my consultant. Stan

Thanks for your response. Unfortunately the horrible remote response times occur when I'm the only one on the system which kind of eliminates in my mind the DSL. Also, the fact that I can vpn in using a msdos prompt and get super fast directory entries displayed, vs 70 seconds using windows explorer vs tens of minutes using FrontPage kind of tells me that the problem is not related to line speeds. I think SBS 2003 is getting lost somewhere either through timeouts... waiting for a response from some internal subsystem or perhaps the problem is related to DNS. Any other thoughts? I appreciate your help, Stan

I've had several consultants looking at my system and so far we have not found a solution to very serious performance issues. The system is a Dell 2650 with dual 3 gig processors, dual channel raid controller, 2 gig of memory. DASD is a powervault 220s that is configured with 14 x 73 gig scsi 15,000 rpm drives in a RAID 10 configuration with two hot spares. The backplane is split so we get a total of 6 x 73 useable. The system is running SBS 2003. We are hosting our own websites as well as an Outlook email server. Connection to the Internet is on a dedicated (to this system only) DSL line that has tested at over 750 upload and 3,000 download speeds. Our router is a late model Netopia which replaced a R9100 (and we saw a performance boost). We have a maximum of 30 users on the system, but the average load is well under 10. When running through our network, the performance is great. Our websites respond in excellent times. However, our VPN connections are driving us nuts. VPN is used for email, and mapping drives from our server to our users for download purposes. Email response is very acceptable, though not as quick as the hardware configuration would suggest. If I access a mapped drive with the command prompt, I can browse directories within seconds. If I access the same mapped drive with windows explorer the response time is 10 seconds to display the root directory of about 15 folders, and over a minute to look at the contents on one directory with over 2,000 entries. I'm not talking about looking at the contents, just the directory entries. When using FrontPage, the remote response time (our pages reside on a mapped drive) is so slow that we can't maintain our websites remotely. Displaying the contents of a folder (again over 2000 entries) takes so long I could cook dinner waiting for a response. We have another server that we use to backup our primary system. It is a dual 1 gig and has RAID-5 configured scsi disks similar to the primary. If I initiate a backup from the primary system to the secondary system from the console, the whole backup takes about 15 minutes. If I initiate it remotely, again using tunneling to get to the drives, it takes THREE HOURS. When I watch the system during the backup, the first described backup has the disk drive lights lit like a Christmas tree. In the second situation, the lights blink once in a two second or so interval. I appreciate any and all help you folks can give, including the elimination of VPN if that is the problem, as long as we can get a high performance solution. Our total needs are: maintain our own websites (12 maximum so far) in both hosting the sites and maintaining the code on the server, host our own email, having the ability to easily and quickly access "mapped" drives or folders on our server to upload or download data. There may be future needs, but this is what we need yesterday. TIA for any and all help/suggestions, etc.