Why is a Gigabit network so slooowww?

[usalabs]

OK, I have never in my life of being a network admin, have I seen such really slow network file transfers, the company I work for as a network admin, uses Gigabit networks with CAT6 cabling, and Gigabit switches, and they are transferring 100's of if not 1000's of files daily to and from workstations and backup servers and their transfer speed is no less than 150MB/s to a peak of 180MB/s, but my home network? Now that's another story.

Being a network admin, I know how to install and setup networks, which I did at my house, I use a highspeed cable modem, a 12 port Gigabit switch and CAT6 cable throughout, every computer in the house has Gigabit NIC's, and there's 3 computers, a network printer, Vonage VOIP adapter, Smart TV, and 2 servers (1x NAS and 1x web server) connected to the LAN, now, this is where it gets interesting, it seems the more files to transfer, the slower the network, IE, to transfer a single 16GB nkl sample file took around 1m 15s at 150MB/s (transfer speed is in bytes not bits), but multiple file transfers of say a folder containing 27,550 files totaling 26.7GB took around 1h 25m at 1.4MB/s (dropping to a minimum of 900B/s (as in bytes per second), as I said earlier, I have never in my life as a network admin come across such slow network, and I can't even figure out why, I even disconnected every device with exception to 2 computers on the switch and tried the same file transfers, and with the same result, I even completely re-wired the system twice, and same result.

Parallel transfers back in the 80s using Laplink was a damn site faster.

It seems to me, the more powerful the computer gets, the more backward the networks is getting, eventually the speed will more likely match that of the old 10/100 base networks.

I've tried just about everything humanly possible,,,, as they say, "2 heads are better than 1",, anyone got any suggestions?

 

[samuria]

You will get a fast transfer to start as files wìll be cached. its trying to work out is it slow network or is it anti virus, hard drive or pc thats slowing it.how are you copying ie filemanger or other. The best to try is built in robocopy as thats was built for this. often setting full duplex will cause it as pcs often cant cope with it as it sends and recieves all at once

 

[usalabs]

You will get a fast transfer to start as files wìll be cached. its trying to work out is it slow network or is it anti virus, hard drive or pc thats slowing it.how are you copying ie filemanger or other. The best to try is built in robocopy as thats was built for this. often setting full duplex will cause it as pcs often cant cope with it as it sends and recieves all at once

I used a mapped network drive, and using windows 7 file manager to drag and drop files/folders across, I even disabled Avast for an hour, and still same result.

Right now as of writing this reply, I'm transferring a folder containing 36,391 files at a total of 35.7GB and it started at 50MB/s (and that was 10 minutes a go) and now it's at 9.4MB/s and says it'll take an estimated 8 hours and 12 minutes.

Before I started the folder transfer, I sent over a 4.3GB ISO file and it only took 28 seconds at a speed of 190MB/s, for a bunch of files at 35GB shouldn't take 8 hours.

Also robocopy can't find the network path and it doesn't understand mapped drives, so I have to use drag and drop.

 

[samuria]

If the network drive has a drive letter robocopy will work it was written for servers to do this exact job by ms. Are you using SSD drives or a slow laptop drive? You need to try copping to a USB and see how quick that is to see if it's the PC or network

 

[usalabs]

If the network drive has a drive letter robocopy will work it was written for servers to do this exact job by ms. Are you using SSD drives or a slow laptop drive? You need to try copping to a USB and see how quick that is to see if it's the PC or network

This is the procedures I tried when using robocopy:-

In an elevated command prompt on the source computer, which is a desktop workstation, with a SATA drive, I typed:-

robocopy c:\users\usalabs\downloads\ H:\storage\Backups\User-Dir\Downloads /MIR

but robocopy showed 'invalid drive letter', so I tried it this way:-

robocopy C:\users\usalabs\downloads\ \\PCSTOR\Files\storage\Backups\User-Dir\Downloads /MIR

and again another error, robocopy showed cannot find network path, and yet, I can open 'My Computer', and see drive H there as a network mapped drive, and I can open it, and perform operations on it, and in the networks folder I see '\\PCSTOR\Files' but inside a command prompt drive H doesn't exist:-

C:\>H: <press enter>
Invalid drive letter

 

[file3456]

Netbios is a crapshoot. I have a strong feeling your speed would be a lot better if you were to setup a central WebDAV server and transfer files to and from that instead. I'd like to go that route myself, but I just use a central FTP for all my file transfers between computer to computer and phone to computer, etc. I use the AndFTP App on my phone. Pretty decent little App full of features.

I used to use a program many moons ago called Simple Socket File Transfer. It was pretty fast, but you had to configure on both computers for one transfer. Just for the heck of it, give this a try and see if you get full gig speed. I just tested it in Windows 7 and it seems to work, but I never transferred with it yet. Simple Socket File Transfer 1.0 - WhitSoft Development

Be sure you download the Unicode version.

Speaking of Apps, in adition to AndFTP, this one looks good too and unlike AndFTP, it supports WebDAV and AWS S3. FolderSync - Apps on Google Play

 

[townsbg]

I'm wondering if Windows is being overburdened by the number of files and not the size. It has to scan each file in the source and check to see if it's in the destination. I found this article. Best Tools for Copying a Large Number of Files in Windows