I have set up a Microsoft Windows SBS 2008 server for a small company (8-10 users). They use it as file server, print server, mail server etc. - basically everything small companies need except a public web server.
Browsing the network shares, printing etc. is usually fast and problem-free, but sometimes, certain actions take an extremely long time. For instance, I recently tried to open a Word document on a network share and waited over a minute for it to appear. Meanwhile, while Word was appearing to hang, I had no trouble browsing the network share from Windows Explorer. After the document initially loaded, I could close Word, re-open the very same file, and it appeared immediately. Similar things happen on all network share actions as well as printing on the SBS printer (takes time to open the print properties dialog).
Copying files over the network is fast, around 10 MB/sec (using 100mbit switches) - I doubt the physical network/link layer is responsible.
This is happening on several client computers (if not all), both Windows XP as well as Windows 7 clients. The computers are all members of the domain.
Any ideas why this is happening? All help and suggestions are very welcome - I have been tearing my hair out over this... Thanks!
Could be an SMB2 issue - you can turn SMB2 off via a registry entry:
Computer\Hkey_Local_Machine\CurrentControlSet\System\LanmanServer\Parameters\SMB2
Set it to 0, create the key if it's not there. Worth a try, you can always turn it back on. Needs a server reboot.
Make sure MS Office is service-packed up.
This sounds as if the SBS Server is paging excessively to me. Under some steady state conditions there is enough RAM for active services to operate from memory but some less critical stuff gets de-prioritized. When a client triggers an action (printing perhaps, editing an Office document) the pages associated with that process have to be reloaded from disk and that can take time, especially if the SBS server has already driving the disk subsystem heavily.
Opening a Word document involves more resources than simply browsing and reading a folder - Word creates a temporary stub file for auto-saving changes and does a number of other things which could trigger the paging issue.
Copying files over the network generally doesn't cause the same issue as the relevant services are amongst the last things that the server will allow to be dumped from RAM. File copies are also typically buffered completely in RAM on the receiving side which also avoids the paging issue unless things get very tight from a memory perspective.
What is the configuration of the SBS Server - CPU's, how much RAM in total, and how many disks have you got, what RAID config and how are they partitioned? For an SBS 2008 server aimed at around 10 users a good sizing would be around 6GB RAM preferably 8GB, mirrored 10K or 15k disks and at least a dual core processor with 5Ghz or more of aggregate CPU.