I'm having a problem with a medical records program that uses a Postgre SQL as a backend.
Several offices are connecting to a corporate site via Cisco VPNs. There is an ASA5055 at corporate and most sites use a PIX. I've determined that speed isn't an issue as I can send/receive files over a netshare through the VPN at around 500KB/s symmetrically.
I run a report in the software on a test account that shows a simple 1 page report, if it were a PDF file it would run be about 50KB total. If the report is ran on the LAN, it appears immediately. When ran remotely, even at a time when all other offices are closed and nothing else is going through the tunnel, it takes 40-50 seconds. Using that information, I gather that the report is no more than about 200KB in size. Pings are under 100ms.
During this time, I can watch the network interface through Task Manager and it appears that the report is being "streamed" to the client at 5-10KB/s.
The server is 2008R2 Enterprise, 2x 4 core Xeon, 56GB ram. System appears to be functioning as expected with no I/O errors.
What could be some causes or solutions to this mystery? Is there anything specifically that I should look at to further troubleshoot this?
Best Answer
You're probably running into latency issues. I've seen database performance over crappy links get downright evil. My next step would be to take a packet-trace of both local and remote connections (can be done on the db server, probably), and take a look at the relative time between packets. While slamming a single file in one stream may be fast in both cases, if the transaction requires some back-and-forth between the client and the server latency can kill perceived throughput.