When I first setup our LAN for SW we had gigabit cards in all the workstations and a gigbit server. It was fast and seemed like working on the network was faster than local. Then a few months ago things slowed down and I couldn't explain it. The IT guy didn't have an answer either. Today I found the answer. I had written a simple VB macro to exercise the network and documented the results. Before the fix I was able to get about 5% utilization tops based on the task manager network graph. Then I applied the fix which was to uninstall the QOS manager in network connection properties. Immediately I was back to the fast old days of 12.5 to 25% utilization. QOS is meant to make your computer be a "nice guy" by limiting bandwidth available, i.e., throughput. This is OK if you are afraid of people running streaming video or downloading gigabytes of data all day. But for SW with its burst type traffic, the Microsoft QOS really gets in the way. After looking at this problem a bit more the thought occurred that maybe SW is on the wrong track when it comes to utilizing the network. Since SW uses TCP/IP to make connections to the server there is going to be a lot of overhead with each packet. If SW used UDP, a connectionless protocol and had some software on the server end integrated with it's network license manager they could push a lot more information throught the pipe without increasing bandwidth. This is kind of what ftp does when using tcp to setup a connection and udp for the data. Wouldn't it be nice if you could collaborate on a network in a way comparable to working locally?
