Question : Network performance issue...

Hi,

We have recently moved into a brand new building that we just had built.  All of the wiring and patch panels are new.  We brought in our servers and switches that were in use at our old building.  We plugged everything in and made sure we matched the link speed and duplex between the ports on the switches and the servers and workstations.  All of the switches are connected via their Gigabit ports and those are set to 1000/Full Duplex.  So, you would think everything should be working great.

We use an application called PowerPath, which basically, there is a client that is installed on all of the workstations and the clients connect to our SQL server to retrieve the data.  This was all working fine in the old building.  Now that we are in the new building, workstations using PowerPath client are experiencing slow performance issues.  I cannot tell if this is a server issue, a client issue, or a network issue.  This is the main application used on all workstations, so it is hard to test if it's just this application or if it's a network issue or what.

Is there any way to effectively determine what is causing the problem?  The server resources seem to be fine, the processor and memory are usually getting less than 30% usage.

Is there a way to tell if the SQL database is not performing well?

Any ideas?

Thank you in advance.

Mark

Answer : Network performance issue...

The key element:  We just had a new building built.

I don't suppose you think all of those contractors actually new how to wire up networks withing walls in the buildings, did you?

You need to "Ring Out" the entire building first.  I will bet that many wires are not pushed down properly, some are miswired [and Ethernet will, indeed, work half-way when wired out of polarity!], they probably used those cheap wall socket that are made entirely by robots for all connections, and stuff like that.

You can do some analysis by checking the CRC erros, latency, etc., on your routers and such, but you will most likely have to supplement this with any of these three:

http://www.Ethereal.com/
http://svs.sv.funpic.de/

or Windows Network Monitor or SMS.

To capture packets between any two machines [or points on the network] while the load seems to be bogging down.  If your packets show resends a lot of the times, then you have wiring problems.

It could also be that moving all of the equipment, thus turning it all off and back on, completely reconfigured your dynamic network configuration and it hasn't settled down to its old well tuned self yet.

Perhaps manual adjustments were made to your Cisco's that were not properly documented and now you have to do them all over again.

But I still tend to think that the electricians didn't get the wiring rung out properly before leaving.  Usually, some minimum wage temporary labor is used to run and install network wires and connectors [ugh!], even on a rich hospital new construction site, after all, who's going to question it, the doctors?