This article is based on an article by
Granite Bear Development, and
is included here with permission. Additional information supplied by
various installers and supporters, and sourced from various official
web sites.
Note : The problems and solutions
discussed here are the result of many installations, and situations.
Although we try and ensure this page is kept up to date, the plethora
of versions and patches of Windows, and the Network servers is such
that we do not guarantee the accuracy of these notes. Use these
suggestions at your own risk.
When you are running TNA 2000 on a Local
Area Network (LAN) then you may encounter some problems. This document
covers some of the more common problems encountered, and their
solutions.
NOTE : The suggestions, and
solutions presented here deal with the Operating System itself. Do not
make changes to the operating system without first consulting your
System Administrator.
- Windows NT users : Are you on
service pack 6 instead of service pack 6a or another service pack?
If so, expect lots of problems. Microsoft
has acknowledged that service pack 6 broke a lot of things network-wise.
You can get service pack 6a at their site or you can go back to service
pack 5, either of which is stable. In addition, do NOT mix service packs
on different NT machines on your network. In other words, run all your
NT machines on service pack 5 or on service pack 6a, but not a mix of
both service packs.
- Is your network slow when using a
mapped drive letter?
If the computer has both TCP/IP and
NetBEUI (network protocols, similar to different spoken languages).
TCP/IP for the Internet and NetBEUI for the local network. TCP/IP is
the default protocol. When connecting to a mapped drive after some
idle time, the computer tries to connect first over TCP/IP and times
out. Then and only then it tries the NetBEUI connection. Go to the
Control Panel > Networks > Bindings. Make NetBEUI as the default
protocol. Better yet, remove NetBEUI.
- Is your network slow when using a
mapped drive letter? (part 2)
Is the drive mapped to the main
computer's drive or to a folder? If it is mapped to a folder, you will
likely see a decrease in performance, often a quite noticeable
decrease. We are not sure why this happens, but mapping directly to
the drive has been proven time and time again to be faster. We have
not discovered the reason for this, despite extended searches of
Microsoft's tech database (
http://msdn.microsoft.com ).
The version of the virtual network
redirector that ships with some version of Windows 95 may cause data
file corruption. This corruption is resolved by installing the
following update for Windows 95.
Windows
95 Virtual Redirector Fix .
The problem is described more technically
in the MS-KB article
Q174371.
Here is Microsoft's "best place to
start" page for dealing with Windows98 issues, including networking
issues.
http://support.microsoft.com/highlights/w98.asp
- Windows ME (Millennium) networking
Here is Microsoft's "best place to
start" page for dealing with Windows ME/Millennium issues, including
networking issues.
http://support.microsoft.com/highlights/winme.asp
Here is Microsoft's "best place to
start" page for dealing with Windows 2000 issues, including networking
issues.
http://support.microsoft.com/highlights/Win2000.asp
Here is Microsoft's "best place to
start" page for dealing with Windows XP issues, including networking
issues.
http://support.microsoft.com/highlights/winxp.asp
- Windows XP running on INTEL
If you are running old, or incomplete
drivers then your very fast Intel computer behaves poorly when running
XP. This is especially evident when using TNA 2000 because of
the disk-intensive nature of databases. We recommend using the
Intel Application
Accelerator as this can improve performance quite dramatically.
The problem could be your Novell
Opportunistic Locking setting. Contact your network person for further
details. How to turn it off? Go to Control Panel -> Networks -> Novell
Client Properties -> Advanced Settings Tab -> Opportunistic Locking
and make sure this is switched off on all client Machines - ALSO Make
sure True Commit is ON at each client PC (This should help stop data
corruption)
- Mixed Novell Networks Sharing 3.x and 4.x
Servers
4.x users accessing data on a 3.x server may
experience overwriting of EOF markers. The EOF is stored on the
individual workstation and not passed correctly between the two server
types. Removing the mixture of server versions eliminates this
problem.
Use of the Novell client is recommended over the
Microsoft client. Also make sure that you have the best possible
client for your version of the server. Client version 3.2, or 3.22 are
recommended for Novell server versions 4 or 5. Client version 3.21 is
not recommended.
These are effectively system modal, and interfere
with the TNA 2000 system. The background modules (Comms, Proceessor,
Report Engine and Network Manager) particularly don't approve of them.
Preferably disable these popups, but if that is not possible then make
sure they are set to Time-Out after say 5 seconds.
- Local drives with Novell loaded
Note that it is possible to have problems with an
incorrect Novell configuration, even if the data files are stored
locally on the C drive, although this is fairly rare.
If a computer crashes, and reboots unexpectedly,
without doing a proper shut-down then some of the files used by that
workstation, on the server, will remain "in-use". This can cause
problems for database systems like TNA 2000. If you do have a problem
then a proper shut-down and reboot is recommended. On Windows the
refresh period is fairly quick so this is not much of an issue. On
Novell it is typically longer (although you can set it on the
server...)
Performance issues are often caused
by network protocol "bindings"
Check the following Network protocols
basics:
- Make sure that your default network
protocol has no bindings to a virtual device
(dialup.....).
- If you are using TCP/IP and you have
dialup on this workstation, try
NetBEUI.
- Try to avoid using IPX and NetBEUI
together. IPX gets confused when
you have a "chatty" NetBEUI. Removing IPX (if you can) is strongly
advised.
- If you need to examine the network
further, check out
http://www.sysinternals.com/tdimon.htm to get a bird's eye view
of what's going on.
- Does the system work on some
machines but seems to "think about it" and then do nothing on others?
Sometimes your Windows doesn't have
enough "files" set in your config.sys. (Config.nt on Win NT/
W2K and XP). Try 100 or 125. If this isn't
descriptive enough, you need to have your consultant do this for you.
Sometimes having full-time virus scanning turned on does this. Ask
your virus software vendor how to work around this OR exclude our
program from your scanner if you can.
Do you have Energy Star features on
your computers? Probably so. Power management and networking DO NOT
MIX. You can have your computers' power management features turn off
and/or dim the monitor, but DO NOT have them turn off the hard drive,
network cards etc. This will definitely cause you grief when computers
are networked. Grief = lost data
Especially check, the Network Card
settings and make sure they cannot be turned off by the Power
Management.
- Database corruptions, timeouts and
other troubles
Another issue is the various ways that
Windows9x and NT try to improve performance, often at the price of
stability. Sometimes these things work, other times they cause network
timeouts because they force additional file operations behind the
scenes and those file operations time out (fail). One way to turn one
of these items off is to turn off "Synchronous buffer commits". To do
this, click Control Panel, System, Performance, File System,
Troubleshooting and check the "Disable synchronous buffer commits"
checkbox.
- Database corruptions, timeouts and
other troubles, part II
Further, Windows NT users face issues
caused by some performance improvements that NT tries to implement
with network applications by 'faking' multiple use of files.
Unfortunately, some users experience file corruption because of this.
This article is a bit of nerd-speak, but your network person should
take a look at it if you are seeing "Access denied" errors on network
files when they *know* that the network permissions are set properly.
http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/Q129/2/02.asp The
topic of this article can also be the cause of database corruption and
network timeouts (drive not available messages and the like).
Another NT
issue re: slow network performance with
Service Pack 4, 5, 6, or 6a (Q249799)
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/support/kb.asp?ID=249799
- Apply at least TSE Service Pack 5 and
Citrix Service Pack 1 ( not Feature Pack 1)
- Increase Pagefile size and make a fixed
length on Secondary drive if available, it should be at least 1.5
times the amount of installed RAM.
- Turn Off "License Logging service" and
Terminal Server Licensing" from the services app.
- Increase Max Registry size to 110Mb
- Make sure you have a sufficient amount
of RAM for each user. Approximately 25 megs of Ram per user, plus 256
Megs of RAM for the OS itself.
- Terminal Server
If you have a large
number of users (in excess of 15) then you may need to increase the
number of Open Files per Connection. See MS-KB article
Q190162
If you are running on
Windows 2000 Service Pack 2 or earlier then an upgrade to at least
Service Pack 3 is recommended. See
Q260910 for information on getting the latest Service Pack for
Windows 2000. See
Q272127 for information on what errors may be caused if you don't
upgrade.
-
Intel CPUs & Motherboards based on Intel chipsets
Especially if you're
running Windows 2000 or Windows XP.
Consider installing the
Intel Application
Accelerator. This can make a massive difference to the
performance of TNA 2000 (and other applications) on this system.
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Possible
Networking Problems and Solutions