Good morning all.
I'm an I.T. manager with little knowledge of engineering software.
Many of my engineers are complaining of slow network performance when opening a drawing, for example, in Navisworks. A slow network has always been a complaint since my start with the company 18 months ago. I'm not clear on a good starting point to identify the problem. I've read about others experiencing the same problem, suggestions using a packet sniffer to capture Autodesk network activity (what ports does Autodesk use and what should I look for?), running Windows perfmon.exe and procexp.exe to compare with packet sniffer results, looking at Autocad "search paths", Autocad hitting a plethora of folders with timeouts before moving to the next if not found, bombardment od DNS requests, etc., but nothing solid to try.
A little about my network. We're running over 1 gig HP switches, in a Dell environment (servers, laptops, a nas, and a san). The drawings are being pulled from a physcial server, not a vm. Given we have 3 sites, we're also running Globalscape Avail for mirroring. We are running Dell laptops (Latitudes E6530's) with i7 Intel processors, 16 gigs of ram, and a 1 gig NVidia video card running Autocad and Navisworks 2013. I don't immediately think it's my network because we can copy files and folders to other places on the network with ease and speed.
Today, I am planning to copy one large project from the server to a new NAS for comparison.
I'm guessing and guessing more about a direction to determine what and where the cause may be. I'm open to any thoughts or suggestions and willing to try most anything.
Eddie