Windows Server 2008 – Fixing Slow Download from Share on Mixed Ethernet Speeds

I have a Windows Server 2008 R2 x64 server that is AD controller and file server. I have a problem that Windows XP clients experience terribly slow (less than 10Mbps, really less than ten-megabits-per-second) downloading of files from a share.

Server is connected to 1Gbps switch using 1Gbps Nvidia NForce card and client is connected using 100Mbps built-in card.

This slow downloading can also be seen when I've booted client computer from CentOS Linux 5.5 Live-USB and used smbclient for downloading. But downloading from a Samba share on Linux server, which is also connected using 1Gbps link is fast.

What is very strange I've created a pair of programs (attached below) which test plain TCP throughput in C#, and they're performing as expected — at about 89Mbps.

I've disabled firewall on client and I'm using dot_nc_l 21000 > NIL on client and dot_nc [client_ip] < 100m.dat on Windows server. And I get about 9 seconds, when copying the same 100MB file from share takes over 2 minutes.

How to eliminate this?

Some pictures generated with wireshark on Linux client:

Downloading 100MB file from Windows 2008 CIFS file server connected with 1Gbps NIC to Centos 5 Linux client connected with 100Mbps NIC with smbclient:

Downloading 100MB file from Fedora Linux CIFS file server on Samba connected with 1Gbps NIC to Centos 5 Linux client connected with 100Mbps NIC with smbclient (same scale as above):

Here are these programs (linked are compiled using mono's gmcs, require .NET2):

dot_nc.cs

using System;
using System.IO;
using System.Diagnostics;
using System.Net.Sockets;

public class dot_nc
{
 public static void Main(string[] args) {
  string hostname = args[0];
  int port = int.Parse(args[1]);

  Stopwatch stopwatch = new Stopwatch();

  stopwatch.Start();
  TcpClient client = new TcpClient(hostname, port);
  stopwatch.Stop();
  Console.WriteLine("Connection: {0}ms", stopwatch.ElapsedMilliseconds);

  stopwatch.Reset();
  stopwatch.Start();
  byte[] buffer = new byte[4096];
  {
   Stream stdin = Console.OpenStandardInput();
   NetworkStream netout = client.GetStream();
   while ( true ) {
    int bytesread = stdin.Read(buffer, 0, buffer.Length);
    if ( bytesread <= 0 ) {
     break;
    }
    netout.Write(buffer, 0, bytesread);
   }
  }
  stopwatch.Stop();
  Console.WriteLine("Sending: {0}ms", stopwatch.ElapsedMilliseconds);
  client.Close();
 }
}

dot_nc_l.cs

using System;
using System.IO;
using System.Diagnostics;
using System.Net;
using System.Net.Sockets;

public class dot_nc
{
 public static void Main(string[] args) {
  int port = int.Parse(args[0]);

  TcpListener server = new TcpListener(IPAddress.Any, port);
  server.Start();
  TcpClient client = server.AcceptTcpClient();
  NetworkStream netin = client.GetStream();

  byte[] buffer = new byte[4096];

  Stream stdout = Console.OpenStandardOutput();
  int processed_bytes = 0;
  int processed_chunks = 0;
  while ( true ) {
   int bytesread = netin.Read(buffer, 0, buffer.Length);
   if ( bytesread <= 0 ) {
    break;
   }
   stdout.Write(buffer, 0, bytesread);
   processed_bytes += bytesread;
   processed_chunks++;
  }
  netin.Close();
  client.Close();
  server.Stop();
  Console.Error.WriteLine(
   "Received: {0} chunks of data of {1} average size", 
   processed_chunks, processed_bytes/processed_chunks
  );
 }
}