SharePoint – Slow File Downloads
Starting to really tackle the issue at work of slow file downloads from SharePoint. Folks at work don’t notice it much, since we’re all local on the wire, but people in Europe are complaining. Based on talks with network and other folks, there’s probably not a lot in Sharepoint we can do about it. There’s plenty of blog entries and advice on optimizing the local network, optimizing the Sharepoint architecture, and optimizing the database.
We’ve done most of this, though I need to go through the exercise of splitting some of my site collections out of the main content database. That will at least provide us some room to grow.
Other than that, we’re going to have our network folks look at the WAN optimization hardware from Riverbed that will help not only Sharepoint, but a lot of other work that will be accessed by people in Europe.
Update: Finally getting some numbers back from the European folks, and they are all over the map. Mostly they do show that downloads from SharePoint are about as slow (or fast) as those from a file server.
Networking is trialing a couple of Riverbed Steelhead devices, WAN accelerators, on both sides the pond to see if that helps. They should be online in a few days.
Greg, any progress on this issue. I’ve got some clients with the same problems and we have been beating our heads against the wall trying to find a solution.
Jake
@Jake Cunningham
Yes, we’ve pretty much resolved this, but it was a hardware solution. The good news is that this accelerated not only our Sharepoint site, but anything else that connected to our data center as well. The bad news is that it’s not a cheap solution. We ended up using a WAN acceleration system from Riverbed called Steelhead. We have a master unit here, and a smaller unit in a remote office in Bradford, England. We are in the process now of rolling out this solution to many of our offices here in the US and and in Europe, and probably Asia at some point.
Like I said, it’s not a cheap solution, but it is the best one out there. We worked with techs from Microsoft on this, and they said that this type of WAN acceleration really is the way to go.