SBS 2008 Slow Network Performance with Windows XP Clients

We had upgraded our server two years ago. We had upgraded to Windows SBS 2008 from 2003. Now recently we had added 25 new clients with Windows XP on them. Everything is connected and looks to be working well. But we are facing problem related to some performance. The network performance between XP client and Windows SBS is quiet low. Whirl compared to that if we do the same on older client the system is far more better. I am not able to troubleshoot the performance problem here. I hope there will be some way to deal with the problem. The system performs relatively slow only when I try to move large documents and media files.

Is it with single workstation or with all. It looks there is some kind of data limit that your server imposed on the transfers. So that is why you are getting relatively low performance. You can try to create your network from scratch again. Run the network configuration wizard and ensure that there is no restriction for file transfers. I think certain server policies have option to limit the user transfer rate. You can keep that on maximum to get optimum output.

You will need to check out some advance options here and then only you would be able to get the answer on your problem. It does not looks like some kind of limitation on the transfer but there is some issue with services which are not working well. The performance can also lag due to outdated or old drivers. You can update the lan drivers and check them once again.

I am also concern about the nic driver. My old server was having a same kind of issue. I performed number of stuff. I had updated windows, I had installed some patches, etc but still it does not look to be working fine. Later on I added a lan card in the server and things are resolved. But you are saying that you have a new system. But still your transfer speed is limited. That can due to limitation of your network. For high data transfer speed you need a powerful lan adapter that can offer you speed in gbps.

I am having the same kind of issue on my network also. To copy a 50MB file it takes around 30 minutes. That is very annoying. Later on I tried to update windows but still somehow the problem is common. It only occur on new server while it looks old servers are quiet optimized to manage the speed. I ma having a Windows 2000 server also and that works much better. The transfer speed is too good. I think there would be some solution it is affecting the productivity to great extent.

Same problem on 2 different networks too....
No antivirus installed, good switch, always use a wizard, completed all BPA problems

I think I have an educated guess as to what is happening. I think it has something to do with IPV6. On both my servers IPV6 and IPV4 are configured.

Could this be the culprit?

I have exactly the same issue with two customers networks. Different hardware, different nic's but both are intel. Speed with windows 7 and vista is perfect, xp is around 1mbytes/sec of a gigabit switch.

What I have read on other forums, as unlikely as it sounds is that it is due to a feature of the Intel NICs in server 2008 called x.

Microsoft KB968991 is the microsoft knowledgebase number for this issue. (this is to do with the intel IO acceleration technology, but i am not sure if this is the cause of the slowness). Another thing to try and fix the problem is to disable TCP window scaling. (through netsh)

Apparently this is a known problem and there are several hotfixes, which I have tried unsuccessfully. This problem has only come to our attention on sites where fast network speeds are needed, for many sites they are probably having the same issue unknowingly.

I am going to try and install a realtek nic to see if it resolves the issue

Someone smarter than me try and work out what causes it???

Put in a low end realtek gigabit nic and the xp machines went from 1megabit to 300megabit file copies from the sbs2008 server. It appears either Intel or MS have something to answer for. I tried all of the patches to fix the issues and none of them worked. I found that after rebooting the speed on the intel nic may be fast for a little while but eventually slows down (almost as if some service kicks in later that causes the slowness issues).

Did it work? God this problem is kicking my head on 3 servers. Clients often also drop offline, when upgraded to windows 7 the problem doesnt occour. The cost of licences isnt really the problem but the POS sale the company uses tends to crash on windows 7. XP is as far as it goes at the moment and these companies are stuck with very slow data transfer and slow software and random times in the day.

I had same problem with 2 IBM Servers X3500 with XP SP2 & SP3 clients, one running 2008R2 and the other 2008 Standard 32bit. Problem was solved when I disabled second onboard NIC, ( originally planned on using hyper V) I also disabled IVP6 did not seem to make much differance. I am also considering disabling TCP Scaling hoping for a little better Internet performance. (netsh interface tcp set global autotuninglevel=disabled)
since their firewall does not support scaling.

It's the antivirus man. **** at last i have it solved. and to think i thought i checked that.

I have the same problem - slowness between Windows XP SP3 systems and Windows Server 2008 Standard. It is only our Peachtree database that seems to be the issue. Peer-to-peer connection. Shared folder mapped on all systems. Once we open the database and then let it sit for about 5 minutes without any activity it seems to freeze. It eventually starts up but very "stop and go". I do have a Windows 7 system that works without any issues and we connected couple of Windows 7 systems to test it out and they worked fine too.

Did the SMB2 settings on the registry but no luck.

We changed cables and switch. I am beginning to wonder if the network cards have anything to do with it!!!

Anybody has solved this slowness problem.

It has been a while since anyone has posted any content. I am still having this issue. The short fix that I have found is to simply disable the Firewall for the Domain. Not very secure to internal threats. Still attempting to get to the bottom of the issue myself.

I did a network capture on my XP client twice. Both times connection to identically configured hardware, and OS Win2k8 R2 with all patches,drivers, settings etc. The only difference was one had the Domain Firewall policy disabled and the other was default.

Start>Run to \\servername-withfirewall\c$ vs. \\servername-nofirewall\c$
(stopped the capture asap after the explorer window appeared)
Results
With firewall cap included 72K packets. No Firewall 9k.

Drilling down found that the Firewall server for some reason starts to communicate to an external IP address 207.46.21.123 via 443 SSL. Whois indicates that this belongs to a windowsupdate ip range. Now the question is why.

That is as far as I have reached today. At this point in thing the shorter path would be to upgrade to Win7 clients.

Hi russell.laplante,

Can you try to install the QOS service on the NIC to see if that fixes the problem. Found a similar issue with users of a Terminal Server 2008 had slow access to data on Windows Server 2003 machines until I installed Qos on those servers. Let us know if that works.

Update:
So I tried something else and at least understand what is happening better. We (unfortunately) are still running NetWare and have the NetWare Client installed. Both removing the NetWare client and or setting the Microsoft Windows Network to be higher that NetWare in the provider order resolves the issue. My feeling is that the XP workstation was hitting the Windows Firewall getting dropped (or something) going out to WindowsUpdate service to find a reason ???? and finally attempting to use the Microsoft Network Client and getting a successful connection.

I was also having similar issue with slow network performance between Windows 7 client and Windows SBS 2008. So, first thing what i did was to update the drivers and firmware on my network devices and made sure that they are running the latest version. Another thing that i did on the windows 7 machine was to troubleshoot it by doing a copy from it to some another system on my network. This will let us know that the problem is unique to the windows 7 machine or if it is just in the connection from it to the SBS2008 server. If that didnt work then disable the firewall as well.