windows 7 - Very slow network transfer speeds

30
2013-10
  • Mobojo

    I am running an HP laptop (compaq 2510p) on Windows 7 32 bit that has a gigabit NIC. I am on an internal work network accessing a share on a server that also has a gigabit NIC. When I try to download an installation file I get a max of 200 kb/sec while my co-worker, who is running off of the same local switch in out office, gets at least 3-6 mb/sec transfer. My CPU and RAM stay below 50% and my network monitor in performance monitor stays below 5%. I have tried the same ethernet cable as my co-worker and he has no problems but I still do.

    Edit: I am in the IT staff so I have access to change things, but I just started so I am not familiar with the network or how this laptop is set up. It was used by the person I replaced since he left a couple of months ago so I do not know what is left on here. I believe the network is 100MB/s but that my NIC is Gigabit. Basically since I am new to their setup I am just looking for general places to look since my boss is busy and isn't available very much.

    Fixed: Turns out it was the card's speed option. It was set to 100MB/s full duplex but changing it to auto negotiate fixed it.

    • Answers
  • John T

    I would try checking with your IT technician or Network Administrator before troubleshooting your connection with a coworker. They may be able to offer you a better answer much faster than your troubleshooting will. Typically the IT department does not like it when employees take things into their own hands as it causes more work in the end.

    The causes could be many things, my best guesses would be:

    • Bad NIC driver.
    • Your MAC address may be throttled at an intermediate level due to your past internet usage (ie. Access-level switch, check with IT) despite the download being internal.
    • Bad switchport
    • Third party software on your machine may be inspecting traffic which can lower performance.

    To be quite honest, both transfer rates are fairly poor for a gigabit network. 10M/s and upward is average.

  • KCotreau

    I believe you may be having may be having issues with your computer trying to connect to a network location that is no longer there. This causes time-outs and slowness. I fixed this issue on a computer just yesterday.

    Try the following:

    1. Run CCleaner, which will clean out recently run caches (like the list of recently opened items in MS Word). While you are there, you could also run the registry cleaner for good measure.
    2. Check to see if you have any mapped drives that do not respond when you click on them. If so, right click, and disconnect them.
    3. Clean out any network shortcuts to non-existent server locations. In Windows 7, it is located here:

    C:\Users\%userprofile%\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\Network Shortcuts


    • Related Question

    networking - Windows 7 File Transfer Speed over Gigabit is slow
  • Adam Haile

    I've got windows 7 pro running on my file server and my main desktop. Each has a gigabit network connection and I'm connected to a gigabit switch. However, when trying to copy some large files, it's running pretty slow at a measly 12-15 MB/s
    The data is coming from a 7200RPM SATA drive (which I think should be good for almost 150MB/s) and going to a Drobo on the server connected via FireWire 800, so I can't think of any bottlenecks I might have in the hardware. But TeraCopy still says it's only going at 12-15 MB/s

    What else could be wrong here?


    • Related Answers
  • Scott McClenning

    I hate to say this is Windows voodoo. I've seen improvements from disabling firewalls/anti-virus to using RAM disks, changing gigabit nics from PCI to PCIe, using faster switches, jumbo frames, flow control and shorter & better cables.

    Funny when I download files from a samba box I seem to get better performance, but still not better than 15% utilization.

    I did a quick search and found this site. I hadn't tried these settings yet.

    To more directly address speed, in Vista and Windows 7, Microsoft made changes to the CopyFile API to increase performance. I don't know if TeraCopy uses it, but I know RoboCopy does. Perhaps running the test with RoboCopy could bring better performance.

    Also, my best transfers were using PCIe cards going from a RAM disk to a RAM disk with my AV off, but still I didn't get more than about 20-25%.

    Perhaps some of these tips will work for you.

  • Shaun3180

    I'm running Windows 7 using Parallels/Boot Camp on a 3.4 Ghz Quad Core i7 with 16 gigs of RAM. Network transfer speeds were between 2 - 60k per second, until I followed the advice in a Cake404 post regarding Broadcom network cards.

    After turning off Ethernet@WireSpeed and disabling "Large Send Offload" options (under the configuration settings for the network card), my transfer speeds went up to multiple megabytes per second.

  • Knowlengr

    Dmitri's post about autonegotiate helped. After two hotfixes and numerous fruitless netsh command tweaks I was seeing very slow download speeds and fast upload speeds. Only on one machine in a 50 device network. Turned out the Intel NIC update from Windows Update had affected the driver settings. In this case, re-enabling autonegotiate helped. 35mbs speed returned.

  • bugzc

    This might be a bit late, but for those having similar issues, I noticed that file transfers between Windows network shares (Win2k3 -> Win2k8R2; Win2k3 -> Win7; some other configurations) are unreasonably slow when TeraCopy (v2.1) is used.

    The prime example was when the setup was as follows: 2 Servers, both having gigabit NICs and connected to a gigabit switch; First server running Win2k3, the second running Win2k8R2. TeraCopy transfer speed of a ~21GB file was 50MB/s at best. Meanwhile, I had a sustained 105MB/s using the normal Windows copy (pulling on the Win2k8 box from the Win2k3). FTP yielded similar results at approximately 105MB/s sustained. Similar results were achieved with Windows 7 running on the client box.

    In similar setups I would get even lower transfer rates with TeraCopy, from 8MB/s to 35MB/s. I tried to tinker with offload options and other settings of both NICs until I decided to try to use the regular Windows copy instead of TeraCopy. The speed difference was surprising.

    The common thing in all of the above setups was the Win2k3 box which acts as the file server. I was changing the OS on the second server which was downloading the test file.

    I have not tested transfer rates between two Win2k3 boxes using TeraCopy and the regular Windows copy yet.

  • Sorbe

    There are many possible choke points -- However Windows 7 SP1, can and does run VERY fast over Gigabit Ethernet.

    I just transferred several gigabytes worth of large files from two disks on my PC to a Synology NAS Box (DS1010+). That pair of Explorer.exe driven transfers reached 118.25Megabytes/sec ( 950 Megabits/sec ) which is 95% saturation of my switched Gigibit Ethernet network, including running through multiple Dlink Gigabit Switches.

  • slhck

    From: Increase your network data speed with this - config-customize - windows-7

    1. Open the registry and browse the following branch:

      HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\lanmanworkstaion

    2. If the following entries aren't already there, Create the DWORDs MaxCmds, MaxThreads and MaxCollectionCount under this branch.Assign them a value of 30, 30and 32 respectively.

    3. After you restart your system, you should experience an increase in the performance of your network transfers.

  • dimitri.p

    One thing that is worth a try before going crazy with anything else is to switch the driver to not use Auto Negotiate for the speed but set it to 100MB/Full Duplex, test the transfer speed and then set it to 10MB/Full Duplex and test the transfer speed.

  • slhck

    Requirement for full speed ethernet transfers (75% of 1000 every transfer +) is a Non-blocking, wire-speed transmission switch!

    Switches:

    • ZyXEL's GS1100-16 16 Port Desktop GbE Switch is a 16-port 10/100/1000 switch (I'm getting 700-800Mbit or 80Mbyte transfers)
    • ZyXEL's GS1100-24 The GS1100-24 is a 24-port 10/100/1000 switch
    • ZyXEL's GS-108B 10/100/1000Mbps Port Desktop GbE Switch is a 8-port 10/100/1000 switch
    • Cisco SR2024 24-port 10/100/1000 Gigabit Switch
    • SMC Networks - SMC8508T - EZ Switch 10/100/1000 - 8-Port 10/100/1000 Gigabit Unmanaged Switch
    • Linksys SR2016 The 16-Port 10/100/1000 Gigabit

    Please try the examples given but if you don't have the right switch then it won't matter what you do at the OS.

  • Martin Parry

    After needing to replace my dodgy old laptop I had to copy several thousand files across a network cable to my new PC - I put up with the days it took to copy as I needed to get back to work so didn't have too much time to try and play.

    Yesterday I had to check 3.4 gig of files (tens of 1000's of small ones) back into a subversion repository - Painful? Hell yeah!

    So this morning I decided to get this sorted - After much looking round the web I found an article which mentioned the one tiny little thing which solved everything!! The link is at the bottom of this comment - Read it AFTER you've seen my results.

    Info: 192.168.0.79 is my top of the range gaming PC and 192.168.0.151 is our office file server

    Step 1 - Run iPerf (Can be found here http://linhost.info/2010/02/iperf-on-windows/ ) - I ran this in dual mode so you could see our server was pretty quick to start with

    C:\Users\Martin\Downloads>iperf -c 192.168.0.151 -w 64k -d
------------------------------------------------------------
Server listening on TCP port 5001
TCP window size: 64.0 KByte
------------------------------------------------------------
------------------------------------------------------------
Client connecting to 192.168.0.151, TCP port 5001
TCP window size: 64.0 KByte
------------------------------------------------------------
[188] local 192.168.0.79 port 61072 connected with 192.168.0.151 port 5001
[212] local 192.168.0.79 port 5001 connected with 192.168.0.151 port 63505
[ ID] Interval       Transfer     Bandwidth
[212]  0.0-10.0 sec   112 MBytes  93.7 Mbits/sec
[188]  0.0-14.1 sec   240 KBytes   140 Kbits/sec

    Next, AND I WAS GOBSMAKED after everything I've been trying for so long - Enable a 9k Jumb Frame on the Network Cards configuration and run the test again.

    The Duplex setting was set to 100Mb full duplex after something else I'd tried so the transfer speed below was 9Mbits less than the setting of the network card - NOT BAD!

    C:\Users\Martin\Downloads>iperf -c 192.168.0.151 -w 64k -d
------------------------------------------------------------
Server listening on TCP port 5001
TCP window size: 64.0 KByte
------------------------------------------------------------
------------------------------------------------------------
Client connecting to 192.168.0.151, TCP port 5001
TCP window size: 64.0 KByte
------------------------------------------------------------
[196] local 192.168.0.79 port 61112 connected with 192.168.0.151 port 5001
[212] local 192.168.0.79 port 5001 connected with 192.168.0.151 port 63511
[ ID] Interval       Transfer     Bandwidth
[212]  0.0-10.0 sec   109 MBytes  91.6 Mbits/sec
[196]  0.0-10.0 sec   110 MBytes  91.7 Mbits/sec

    C:\Users\Martin\Downloads>

    One final tweek - I removed the duplex setting and set it back to "Auto" and ran the test again

    C:\Users\Martin\Downloads>iperf -c 192.168.0.151 -w 64k -d
------------------------------------------------------------
Server listening on TCP port 5001
TCP window size: 64.0 KByte
------------------------------------------------------------
------------------------------------------------------------
Client connecting to 192.168.0.151, TCP port 5001
TCP window size: 64.0 KByte
------------------------------------------------------------
[192] local 192.168.0.79 port 61169 connected with 192.168.0.151 port 5001
[216] local 192.168.0.79 port 5001 connected with 192.168.0.151 port 63525
[ ID] Interval       Transfer     Bandwidth
[216]  0.0-10.0 sec   674 MBytes   564 Mbits/sec
[192]  0.0-10.0 sec   787 MBytes   659 Mbits/sec

    BOOM!!! A Massive increase - Hope this works for everyone

    Martin

    Original post that helped... http://www.hanselman.com/blog/WiringTheHouseForAHomeNetworkPart5GigabitThroughputAndVista.aspx

  • Canadian Luke
    1. Click on Start
    2. Type "Local Security Policy" and press Enter
    3. Navigate to Security Settings > Local Policies > Security Options

    4. Set the following settings:

      Network security: Minimum session security for NTLM SSP based (including secure RPC) clients > untick "require 128-bit encryption
      Network LAN Manager authentication level > Send LM & NTLM - use NTLMv2 session security if negotiated

  • surfasb

    This is a driver issue and a common problem.

    http://social.answers.microsoft.com/Forums/en/w7files/thread/a57e4e87-fc82-4b4e-a057-4c206422190e