SMB Throughput variation between W2003 SP2 Standard/Enter

[Adie]

DL380-G5 windows 2003 R2 Standard Edt SP2 copy via network shares & copy & paste generates around 500mb/s of traffic over a single gigabit network. If one of the servers is replaced with a ML370 G5 and Enterprise Edition (12GB RAM) the performance (copying to the ML370) drops considerably and generates a sort of square wave in the Network monitor (within Task mgr). We think it is the lazy writes but why such a huge difference between the two systems?

[James ~ Happy Dude]

Adie,
This could be due to the Various network Scaling issues.

Are the NIC cards teamed ??

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/912222
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/936594 (Important hotfix which in NOT included in SP2)

& Very interestingly :
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/community/columns/cableguy/cg0606.mspx

Regards.

[Adie]

Nope, not teamed

I've tried all the RSS & ToE fixes etc and they don't appear to be relevant to this case.

Two copies at the same time from the same source to the same destination get more thoughput but I'm looking for single copy performance.

[Roger Faucher]

Adie:

You don't mention it so I must ask: do both systems have 2 processors? are they comparable?

Make a great day!

Roger

[Ivan Ferreira]

Check your network switch statistics, try to identify if there is a negotiation problem.

Check your disks performance, try to identify if the problem is related to disk I/O instead of network. Try with local performance testings (suddenly, windows does not provide /dev/null).

[Adie]

Yep two dual core processors each.
Same external RAID array on both types of server. Local performance is fine.

There is no switch this is point to point. Both ends on Auto.