Resolving Network Issues
Procedure
-
Test and monitor key applications and network connections
Active monitoring can provide insight into network performance on key interfaces, and can alert you when conditions begin to decline. Periodic checks in the background to the application host can provide an ongoing baseline of the performance of the network between users and the host. If the baseline increases, alarms are used to notify administrators that network latency is becoming an issue.
-
Keep track of latency over time
Graphing latency over time helps to identify patterns and anomalies that deserve closer attention. Latency monitoring can help correlate areas of latency with other relevant statistics, as well as the actual network traffic occurring at that time. This type of high-resolution forensic analysis can help to detect latency problems at the highest level and drill down quickly for a closer look. Ideally, network latency and application latency measurements can be graphed together over time. Comparing the measurements and seeing the differences can provide information that might have otherwise been overlooked.
-
Try to isolate the problem component.
If the problem seems to be related to a wireless card, considering swapping to a different card or changing the network cable.
-
Try different hardware settings.
Enabling duplexing, changing the link speed on the network cards and switches to be the same speed, changing the MTU in the network protocol setting and enabling jumbo frames can all help with latency.
-
Ensure that all SMB2 patches have been installed.
-
Turn off WAN acceleration.
Turning off WAN acceleration may just be a matter of consulting with the WAN Accelerator vendor to find a fix by disabling caching or certain protocols.
-
Turn off network compression/encryption/virus checking.
Adjusting the network compression and encryption when using a VPN may reduce overhead on the network connection resulting in better throughput and reduced packet loss.
-
Ensure that am online backup is not being performed on the client file while the files is in use.
-
Turn off all types of data snapshots on active client files hosted in virtualized environments.
Snapshots or replays can cause data corruption on larger files when writing back data to them and will result in file corruption and synchronization errors.
Results
The network issue has been resolved or isolated.