how to benchmark server performance

[vluu]

Hi Everyone,

We have user's complaining that between certain times, 5pm to 6pm that everything is slow, such as LAN, accessing files on servers, outlook...I have run performance monitor on their file servers....but what to know how to benchmark the system???

As our fileserver, we are using a HP Proliant DL380 G2, two PIII 800Mhz cpu, 2GB of ram, data are kept on raid5 4x300GB 10K ultra320 ScSi drives, nics are 100/full as well as user workstation. this servers has approx. 80users. They work with a lot of macro excel files, sometimes across WAN.

At first glance, i do not see anything wrong from the performance monitor logs, i see fluctations, nothing running at 100% utilization for a long time....So how can i find out what is performance adequate, like how many milliseconds should the disk i/o be for writing to disk or reading from disk, etc...

Thanks for your help!