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Tip of the Month

April 2000

Poor response time from a server

Poor response time from a server? If the server has low CPU and process utilization, then the problem may reside with a different server altogether. The server may be communicating with another server for authentication, database access, etc. In one such case, we've noticed a large logon delay whenever a user's NetWare server containing an NDS backup replica had to contact a very busy server with the NDS master replica.

The generalized technique for identifying these kinds of problems is to use a protocol analyzer with plenty of buffer space to capture all packets from the "slow" server's segment. Then, pick a user/server command/response packet pair for which there is a large delay and look at other packets in between the initial command and final response packets for clues.