| Author |
Message |
Steve Biggs
Guest
|
 Posted:
Wed Oct 19, 2005 4:51 pm Post subject:
Uploading via ISA 2004 - Poor performance - why? |
|
|
Hi,
Some of my company is using our SharePoint 2003 SP1 server via ISA 2004 used
as a proxy on port 8080.
We've noticed that uploading new documents to SharePoint via the proxy
(simply configured in the IE 6 browsers) can be enormously slow - much slower
than accessing the server directly (i.e. no proxy).
We've used some HTTP tracing tools on this. It turns out that multiple
uploads are usually fine, but upload times for single documents (mostly Word
2003) can vary by up to 500%. For instance, a 3MB file can take 7s to upload
without a proxy, but up to 50s with - for larger files, the SharePoint server
seems to time out the requests (which is a severe problem). The tracing
shows no abnormal request/responses above the expected (authentication).
This was tested on a semi-isolated system (i.e. no other users were using
any of the machines involved).
Our SharePoint site is very simple (no web parts or IIS extensions) as is
our ISA configuration (no extensions either, just a basic "allow all" rule)
and IE itself (mostly all basic installations) - all on a 100Mb LAN. Our SPS
site does not (yet) use SQL server and has (in the past) reached the storage
limit (but currently has enough spare capacity).
Can anyone say why there are such wide variations in upload performance?
Can anyone suggest other ways we might investigate the cause of this?
(Note that changing our architecture - e.g. including the web server as a
proxy exception, is not possible. We are replicating a configuration of a
customer for product purposes.)
Cheers,
Steve. |
|
| Back to top |
|
 |
Ray
Guest
|
| Posted:
Fri Oct 21, 2005 6:02 am Post subject:
Re: Uploading via ISA 2004 - Poor performance - why? |
|
|
Is there a reason they are running through ISA? Normally you would set an
exclusion in ISA for internal servers so they do not have to run through
ISA. I understand why you say you can't do it, but is it possible your
customer doesn't know they have it configured wrong?
Ray
"Steve Biggs" <SteveBiggs@discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in message
news:5C80AC86-2B4A-4605-9335-3140FED4DF84@microsoft.com...
| Quote: | Hi,
Some of my company is using our SharePoint 2003 SP1 server via ISA 2004
used
as a proxy on port 8080.
We've noticed that uploading new documents to SharePoint via the proxy
(simply configured in the IE 6 browsers) can be enormously slow - much
slower
than accessing the server directly (i.e. no proxy).
We've used some HTTP tracing tools on this. It turns out that multiple
uploads are usually fine, but upload times for single documents (mostly
Word
2003) can vary by up to 500%. For instance, a 3MB file can take 7s to
upload
without a proxy, but up to 50s with - for larger files, the SharePoint
server
seems to time out the requests (which is a severe problem). The tracing
shows no abnormal request/responses above the expected (authentication).
This was tested on a semi-isolated system (i.e. no other users were using
any of the machines involved).
Our SharePoint site is very simple (no web parts or IIS extensions) as is
our ISA configuration (no extensions either, just a basic "allow all"
rule)
and IE itself (mostly all basic installations) - all on a 100Mb LAN. Our
SPS
site does not (yet) use SQL server and has (in the past) reached the
storage
limit (but currently has enough spare capacity).
Can anyone say why there are such wide variations in upload performance?
Can anyone suggest other ways we might investigate the cause of this?
(Note that changing our architecture - e.g. including the web server as a
proxy exception, is not possible. We are replicating a configuration of a
customer for product purposes.)
Cheers,
Steve. |
|
|
| Back to top |
|
|
Steve Biggs
Guest
|
| Posted:
Fri Oct 21, 2005 8:51 am Post subject:
Re: Uploading via ISA 2004 - Poor performance - why? |
|
|
Hi Ray,
Thanks for the response. It's only configured for internal use temporarily
(for configuration testing); eventually it will deployed over a WAN with
higher latency, lower bandwidth etc. But that makes it worse - if it gets
timeouts on a LAN, then over a WAN it almost certainly won't work at all!
Hence, it was felt that if we can discover the problem of why single uploads
timeout in this situation, we might have a better chance of progressing the
whole project :(
To recap: Single document uploads timeout, where as "Upload multiple
files..." uploads of a single document don't. The former uses a smaller
number of larger packets to the latter, which tends to suggest that one of
the components (ISA, IIS or ASP.Net/SharePoint) isn't handling those larger
packets very well. But all of them are pretty much out-of-the-box
installations.
Does anyone have any answers to the questions:
| Quote: | Can anyone say why there are such wide variations in upload performance?
Can anyone suggest other ways we might investigate the cause of this?
....other than "why are you running with that configuration"? :) |
Cheers,
Steve.
"Ray" wrote:
| Quote: | Is there a reason they are running through ISA? Normally you would set an
exclusion in ISA for internal servers so they do not have to run through
ISA. I understand why you say you can't do it, but is it possible your
customer doesn't know they have it configured wrong?
Ray
"Steve Biggs" <SteveBiggs@discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in message
news:5C80AC86-2B4A-4605-9335-3140FED4DF84@microsoft.com...
Hi,
Some of my company is using our SharePoint 2003 SP1 server via ISA 2004
used
as a proxy on port 8080.
We've noticed that uploading new documents to SharePoint via the proxy
(simply configured in the IE 6 browsers) can be enormously slow - much
slower
than accessing the server directly (i.e. no proxy).
We've used some HTTP tracing tools on this. It turns out that multiple
uploads are usually fine, but upload times for single documents (mostly
Word
2003) can vary by up to 500%. For instance, a 3MB file can take 7s to
upload
without a proxy, but up to 50s with - for larger files, the SharePoint
server
seems to time out the requests (which is a severe problem). The tracing
shows no abnormal request/responses above the expected (authentication).
This was tested on a semi-isolated system (i.e. no other users were using
any of the machines involved).
Our SharePoint site is very simple (no web parts or IIS extensions) as is
our ISA configuration (no extensions either, just a basic "allow all"
rule)
and IE itself (mostly all basic installations) - all on a 100Mb LAN. Our
SPS
site does not (yet) use SQL server and has (in the past) reached the
storage
limit (but currently has enough spare capacity).
Can anyone say why there are such wide variations in upload performance?
Can anyone suggest other ways we might investigate the cause of this?
(Note that changing our architecture - e.g. including the web server as a
proxy exception, is not possible. We are replicating a configuration of a
customer for product purposes.)
Cheers,
Steve.
|
|
|
| Back to top |
|
|
Ray
Guest
|
| Posted:
Sat Oct 22, 2005 12:51 am Post subject:
Re: Uploading via ISA 2004 - Poor performance - why? |
|
|
Gotcha. If it's not running through ISA when on the WAN, this may be a
non-issue then. I've never tried it with WSS but I know some Oracle
JInitiator applications puke if forced through ISA for internal use.
Ray
"Steve Biggs" <SteveBiggs@discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in message
news:53CA83EF-D634-4C38-B627-CDF03949F122@microsoft.com...
| Quote: | Hi Ray,
Thanks for the response. It's only configured for internal use
temporarily
(for configuration testing); eventually it will deployed over a WAN with
higher latency, lower bandwidth etc. But that makes it worse - if it gets
timeouts on a LAN, then over a WAN it almost certainly won't work at all!
Hence, it was felt that if we can discover the problem of why single
uploads
timeout in this situation, we might have a better chance of progressing
the
whole project :(
To recap: Single document uploads timeout, where as "Upload multiple
files..." uploads of a single document don't. The former uses a smaller
number of larger packets to the latter, which tends to suggest that one of
the components (ISA, IIS or ASP.Net/SharePoint) isn't handling those
larger
packets very well. But all of them are pretty much out-of-the-box
installations.
Does anyone have any answers to the questions:
Can anyone say why there are such wide variations in upload
performance?
Can anyone suggest other ways we might investigate the cause of this?
...other than "why are you running with that configuration"? :)
Cheers,
Steve.
"Ray" wrote:
Is there a reason they are running through ISA? Normally you would set
an
exclusion in ISA for internal servers so they do not have to run through
ISA. I understand why you say you can't do it, but is it possible your
customer doesn't know they have it configured wrong?
Ray
"Steve Biggs" <SteveBiggs@discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in message
news:5C80AC86-2B4A-4605-9335-3140FED4DF84@microsoft.com...
Hi,
Some of my company is using our SharePoint 2003 SP1 server via ISA
2004
used
as a proxy on port 8080.
We've noticed that uploading new documents to SharePoint via the proxy
(simply configured in the IE 6 browsers) can be enormously slow - much
slower
than accessing the server directly (i.e. no proxy).
We've used some HTTP tracing tools on this. It turns out that
multiple
uploads are usually fine, but upload times for single documents
(mostly
Word
2003) can vary by up to 500%. For instance, a 3MB file can take 7s to
upload
without a proxy, but up to 50s with - for larger files, the SharePoint
server
seems to time out the requests (which is a severe problem). The
tracing
shows no abnormal request/responses above the expected
(authentication).
This was tested on a semi-isolated system (i.e. no other users were
using
any of the machines involved).
Our SharePoint site is very simple (no web parts or IIS extensions) as
is
our ISA configuration (no extensions either, just a basic "allow all"
rule)
and IE itself (mostly all basic installations) - all on a 100Mb LAN.
Our
SPS
site does not (yet) use SQL server and has (in the past) reached the
storage
limit (but currently has enough spare capacity).
Can anyone say why there are such wide variations in upload
performance?
Can anyone suggest other ways we might investigate the cause of this?
(Note that changing our architecture - e.g. including the web server
as a
proxy exception, is not possible. We are replicating a configuration
of a
customer for product purposes.)
Cheers,
Steve.
|
|
|
| Back to top |
|
|
Steve Biggs
Guest
|
| Posted:
Thu Nov 03, 2005 1:51 pm Post subject:
Re: Uploading via ISA 2004 - Poor performance - why? |
|
|
In the end, Microsoft Support came to the rescue with a potential workaround,
so I thought it would be good to post it back to the group for comment or
enlightenment!
It appears to be an incompatibility between ISA and Windows Server 2003,
which has an interesting TCP/IP "ACK" issue.
See:
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;823764
which mentions a new registry entry on 2003:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/328890/
which may require a hotfix to work:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/815230/
Quoting from the support reply:
The SPS Single file transfer uses an 8192 byte buffer and the SPS Multiple
file transfer uses a 4096 bytes buffer. An 8K buffer from an Ethernet
perspective is not a great buffer size and you end up with 5 full packets of
1460 bytes and one 892 byte buffer. ISA will ACK the 5 full packets but wait
200ms to ACK the last. This causes quite a big delay.
In the multiple file transfer case, the buffer is only 4096 bytes, which
gives us 2 packets with 1460 bytes and one with 1176. This seems to push the
packet faster.
Cheers,
Steve.
"Ray" wrote:
| Quote: | Gotcha. If it's not running through ISA when on the WAN, this may be a
non-issue then. I've never tried it with WSS but I know some Oracle
JInitiator applications puke if forced through ISA for internal use. |
|
|
| Back to top |
|
|
Steve Biggs
Guest
|
| Posted:
Thu Nov 03, 2005 1:51 pm Post subject:
Re: Uploading via ISA 2004 - Poor performance - why? |
|
|
Interestingly, this turned out to be a potential incompatibility between ISA
and Windows Server 2003. See:
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;823764
which mentions a new registry entry on 2003:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/328890/
which may require a hotfix to work:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/815230/
Microsoft came to the rescue with thie above as a potential workaround and
it appears to work, so I thought I'd post the solution back to the group for
comment or enlightenment!
Quoting from the support reply:
The SPS Single file transfer uses an 8192 byte buffer and the SPS Multiple
file transfer uses a 4096 bytes buffer. An 8K buffer from an Ethernet
perspective is not a great buffer size and you end up with 5 full packets of
1460 bytes and one 892 byte buffer. ISA will ACK the 5 full packets but wait
200ms to ACK the last. This causes quite a big delay.
In the multiple file transfer case, the buffer is only 4096 bytes, which
gives us 2 packets with 1460 bytes and one with 1176. This seems to push the
packet faster.
Cheers,
Steve.
"Ray" wrote:
| Quote: | Gotcha. If it's not running through ISA when on the WAN, this may be a
non-issue then. I've never tried it with WSS but I know some Oracle
JInitiator applications puke if forced through ISA for internal use.
Ray
"Steve Biggs" <SteveBiggs@discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in message
news:53CA83EF-D634-4C38-B627-CDF03949F122@microsoft.com...
Hi Ray,
Thanks for the response. It's only configured for internal use
temporarily
(for configuration testing); eventually it will deployed over a WAN with
higher latency, lower bandwidth etc. But that makes it worse - if it gets
timeouts on a LAN, then over a WAN it almost certainly won't work at all!
Hence, it was felt that if we can discover the problem of why single
uploads
timeout in this situation, we might have a better chance of progressing
the
whole project :(
To recap: Single document uploads timeout, where as "Upload multiple
files..." uploads of a single document don't. The former uses a smaller
number of larger packets to the latter, which tends to suggest that one of
the components (ISA, IIS or ASP.Net/SharePoint) isn't handling those
larger
packets very well. But all of them are pretty much out-of-the-box
installations.
Does anyone have any answers to the questions:
Can anyone say why there are such wide variations in upload
performance?
Can anyone suggest other ways we might investigate the cause of this?
...other than "why are you running with that configuration"? :)
Cheers,
Steve.
"Ray" wrote:
Is there a reason they are running through ISA? Normally you would set
an
exclusion in ISA for internal servers so they do not have to run through
ISA. I understand why you say you can't do it, but is it possible your
customer doesn't know they have it configured wrong?
Ray
"Steve Biggs" <SteveBiggs@discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in message
news:5C80AC86-2B4A-4605-9335-3140FED4DF84@microsoft.com...
Hi,
Some of my company is using our SharePoint 2003 SP1 server via ISA
2004
used
as a proxy on port 8080.
We've noticed that uploading new documents to SharePoint via the proxy
(simply configured in the IE 6 browsers) can be enormously slow - much
slower
than accessing the server directly (i.e. no proxy).
We've used some HTTP tracing tools on this. It turns out that
multiple
uploads are usually fine, but upload times for single documents
(mostly
Word
2003) can vary by up to 500%. For instance, a 3MB file can take 7s to
upload
without a proxy, but up to 50s with - for larger files, the SharePoint
server
seems to time out the requests (which is a severe problem). The
tracing
shows no abnormal request/responses above the expected
(authentication).
This was tested on a semi-isolated system (i.e. no other users were
using
any of the machines involved).
Our SharePoint site is very simple (no web parts or IIS extensions) as
is
our ISA configuration (no extensions either, just a basic "allow all"
rule)
and IE itself (mostly all basic installations) - all on a 100Mb LAN.
Our
SPS
site does not (yet) use SQL server and has (in the past) reached the
storage
limit (but currently has enough spare capacity).
Can anyone say why there are such wide variations in upload
performance?
Can anyone suggest other ways we might investigate the cause of this?
(Note that changing our architecture - e.g. including the web server
as a
proxy exception, is not possible. We are replicating a configuration
of a
customer for product purposes.)
Cheers,
Steve.
|
|
|
| Back to top |
|
|
Ray
Guest
|
| Posted:
Thu Nov 03, 2005 5:51 pm Post subject:
Re: Uploading via ISA 2004 - Poor performance - why? |
|
|
Hey, thanks for the follow-up! I forwarded your message to the folks at
www.isaserver.org as this would make a good FAQ addition.
Ray
"Steve Biggs" <SteveBiggs@discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in message
news:6891628C-29C6-4233-BEB7-79A2834C4879@microsoft.com...
| Quote: | Interestingly, this turned out to be a potential incompatibility between
ISA
and Windows Server 2003. See:
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;823764
which mentions a new registry entry on 2003:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/328890/
which may require a hotfix to work:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/815230/
Microsoft came to the rescue with thie above as a potential workaround and
it appears to work, so I thought I'd post the solution back to the group
for
comment or enlightenment!
Quoting from the support reply:
The SPS Single file transfer uses an 8192 byte buffer and the SPS Multiple
file transfer uses a 4096 bytes buffer. An 8K buffer from an Ethernet
perspective is not a great buffer size and you end up with 5 full packets
of
1460 bytes and one 892 byte buffer. ISA will ACK the 5 full packets but
wait
200ms to ACK the last. This causes quite a big delay.
In the multiple file transfer case, the buffer is only 4096 bytes, which
gives us 2 packets with 1460 bytes and one with 1176. This seems to push
the
packet faster.
Cheers,
Steve.
"Ray" wrote:
Gotcha. If it's not running through ISA when on the WAN, this may be a
non-issue then. I've never tried it with WSS but I know some Oracle
JInitiator applications puke if forced through ISA for internal use.
Ray
"Steve Biggs" <SteveBiggs@discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in message
news:53CA83EF-D634-4C38-B627-CDF03949F122@microsoft.com...
Hi Ray,
Thanks for the response. It's only configured for internal use
temporarily
(for configuration testing); eventually it will deployed over a WAN
with
higher latency, lower bandwidth etc. But that makes it worse - if it
gets
timeouts on a LAN, then over a WAN it almost certainly won't work at
all!
Hence, it was felt that if we can discover the problem of why single
uploads
timeout in this situation, we might have a better chance of
progressing
the
whole project :(
To recap: Single document uploads timeout, where as "Upload multiple
files..." uploads of a single document don't. The former uses a
smaller
number of larger packets to the latter, which tends to suggest that
one of
the components (ISA, IIS or ASP.Net/SharePoint) isn't handling those
larger
packets very well. But all of them are pretty much out-of-the-box
installations.
Does anyone have any answers to the questions:
Can anyone say why there are such wide variations in upload
performance?
Can anyone suggest other ways we might investigate the cause of
this?
...other than "why are you running with that configuration"? :)
Cheers,
Steve.
"Ray" wrote:
Is there a reason they are running through ISA? Normally you would
set
an
exclusion in ISA for internal servers so they do not have to run
through
ISA. I understand why you say you can't do it, but is it possible
your
customer doesn't know they have it configured wrong?
Ray
"Steve Biggs" <SteveBiggs@discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in
message
news:5C80AC86-2B4A-4605-9335-3140FED4DF84@microsoft.com...
Hi,
Some of my company is using our SharePoint 2003 SP1 server via ISA
2004
used
as a proxy on port 8080.
We've noticed that uploading new documents to SharePoint via the
proxy
(simply configured in the IE 6 browsers) can be enormously slow -
much
slower
than accessing the server directly (i.e. no proxy).
We've used some HTTP tracing tools on this. It turns out that
multiple
uploads are usually fine, but upload times for single documents
(mostly
Word
2003) can vary by up to 500%. For instance, a 3MB file can take
7s to
upload
without a proxy, but up to 50s with - for larger files, the
SharePoint
server
seems to time out the requests (which is a severe problem). The
tracing
shows no abnormal request/responses above the expected
(authentication).
This was tested on a semi-isolated system (i.e. no other users
were
using
any of the machines involved).
Our SharePoint site is very simple (no web parts or IIS
extensions) as
is
our ISA configuration (no extensions either, just a basic "allow
all"
rule)
and IE itself (mostly all basic installations) - all on a 100Mb
LAN.
Our
SPS
site does not (yet) use SQL server and has (in the past) reached
the
storage
limit (but currently has enough spare capacity).
Can anyone say why there are such wide variations in upload
performance?
Can anyone suggest other ways we might investigate the cause of
this?
(Note that changing our architecture - e.g. including the web
server
as a
proxy exception, is not possible. We are replicating a
configuration
of a
customer for product purposes.)
Cheers,
Steve.
|
|
|
| Back to top |
|
|
Steve Biggs
Guest
|
| Posted:
Thu Nov 03, 2005 5:51 pm Post subject:
Re: Uploading via ISA 2004 - Poor performance - why? |
|
|
No problem, Ray - I hate it when these threads trail off with no resolution
:-).
Good idea to post to that site - I think its an important discovery (it is
for us here!) as it's entirely reproduceable and deserves wider distribution.
I have requested that MS add it to their KnowledgeBase but no response on
that front as yet.
Cheers,
Steve.
"Ray" wrote:
| Quote: | Hey, thanks for the follow-up! I forwarded your message to the folks at
www.isaserver.org as this would make a good FAQ addition.
Ray |
|
|
| Back to top |
|
|
|
|
|
|
FAQ
Memberlist
Register
Profile
Log in to check your private messages
Log in