I am having real troubles with a VPN connection. The VPN connection is not used for a internet connection just for file browsing.
File browsing is slow, taking about 3-4 seconds to bring up a list of folders. I can live with this, however the problem is when I right click on a file. Sometimes the right click menu comes up instantly but sometimes it brings up the wait icon for anywhere between 30 seconds to a few minutes before displaying the menu.
I ran speedtest.net and the results were: 3.08 Down/0.13 Up (Mbps)
0.13Mbps = 16kbps upload. So I am not experiencing miracles with opening files. A 120kb file can take anywhere from 5 to 30 seconds. Sometimes transfering/opening files happens as expected other times its slow but the real issue is with the right click as mentioned.
Anyone have any ideas?
Using PPTP
Clients are all windows 7 pro
SMB is somewhat of a "ping-pong-protocol" - it does a lot of interdependent back-and-forth communications for most of its actions. A Technet blog entry explains this quite colourfully:
So transfers and directory listings will not only depend on your available downstream bandwidth, but also greatly on the latency of your link and the bandwidth of your upstream connection. The same blog article recommends changing SizReqBuf on the file servers to 61440 as described in KB 320829 to somewhat alleviate this situation - this especially should help with speeding up directory listings.
Have you any apps installed which have added context menu items to Explorer? WinZip, 7-Zip and others will do this. Try disabling any additional context menus and see if that resolves the issue.
This is going to sound weird, but we have seen slow Windows Share issues (directory displays, right clicking, etc..) if we did not disable "Automatically detect settings". This configuration setting is under Internet Explorer \ Tools \ Internet Options \ Connections Tab \ LAN Settings. With that setting disabled there is a remarkable difference when accessing file shares vie file explorer.