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We're in a small satellite office connected to our HQ over a VPN connection. The connection itself is not bad, ping times are around 100 ms, remote access, telnet and FTP speeds are fine.

However, connecting to HQ's Windows servers from our Windows clients is absolutely horrible. Generally, I do this via 'My Computer', using \server, possibly followed by path. Displaying a 10-item directory can require upwards of 2 minutes of hourglass watching.

If I 'net use' the server, directory listings are much faster, so it seems to be a 'My Computer' problem.

I'm using Windows XP 64-bit, but all 10 machines at this site (Vista, Win7, etc) all exhibit this problem to one extent or another.

Unfortunately, I cannot at this time tell you much about the network topology at our HQ site, but I can ask if anyone has any specific questions.

Marc Bernier
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3 Answers3

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100ms ping times are not great ping times as far as I'm concerned. SMB\RPC communications have always lagged via VPN connections in my experience. SMB\RPC communication requires more resources than FTP, HTTP, SMTP, etc. and in addition the VPN traffic has to be encrypted\decrypted so IMHO you're probably not going to be able to do anything to make it any better.

joeqwerty
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SMB resource isn't really that much as much as the fact that the protocol requires acknowledgements of almost everything. Over a high latency link this means you are frequently waiting for the other side to say 'OK'.

If you really want to improve things you should consider upgrading to Windows Vista/7 and Windows 2008/2008r2.

See this question about SMB performance for some things you can do in the interim.

Community
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Zoredache
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Try testing these registry settings on one of the clients: 

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\*\shellex\PropertySheetHandlers\CryptoSignMenu]
"SuppressionPolicy"=dword:00100000

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\*\shellex\PropertySheetHandlers\{3EA48300-8CF6-101B-84FB-666CCB9BCD32}]
"SuppressionPolicy"=dword:00100000

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\*\shellex\PropertySheetHandlers\{883373C3-BF89-11D1-BE35-080036B11A03}]
"SuppressionPolicy"=dword:00100000

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\SCAPI]
"Flags"=dword:00100c02

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer]
"NoRemoteRecursiveEvents"=dword:00000001

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer]
"NoRemoteChangeNotify"=dword:00000001


[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Advanced]
"NoNetCrawling"=dword:00000001

You may also want to reduce the MTU of the LAN adapter on the client, typically 1400 or less. That setting is located in the registry at:

Key: HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\services\Tcpip\Parameters\Interfaces{LAN adapter guid}
Value: MTU (Dword) 1400 (decimal)

Greg Askew
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