Greg Walrath

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.