Ensuring That Your Computer Network is Performing at Its Best

Tracking and cracking your network to ensure that there are no performance problems is not easy. More than just identifying mystifying bottlenecks, ensuring network efficiency requires an almost high understanding of how your network is functioning down to the nitty gritty stuff. It is also the ability to have a somewhat “thick skin” to withstand the heat when problems inevitably arise. Also, it is remembering that just because something is wrong with the network doesn’t mean we get to blame the network itself at all times.

To keep that network humming, there are certain areas you really need to tweak that can lead to significant performance gains. This also ensures that your system is blazing that is essential to your needs.

Disk striping

Often the network itself is not the bottleneck. If you have several hard drives, you can combine them into one logical drive where the data is “striped” across them. There are some downsides but performance is not one of them. This is called “RAID 0” by computer experts.

Balance your system load

In the same vein as disk striping, you don’t want all your I/O for your NIC, hard drives, and tape drives, etc. on the same load. Most servers have several, so put some thought into how you can optimize this. Specifically, realize that data does not go directly from the hard drive to the NIC if they are on the same load. All the components still have to chat with your CPU, so if there is contention, it is faster if they are on separate loads.

Clean up network protocols

If you are one of those people that still have NetWare IPX, Appletalk, NetBEUI, and TCP/IP protocols bound to every interface on your server, get rid of the ones you are not using. Refusing to let go of the past often results in increased costs, downtime, and fragility of core systems. Instead of holding meeting after meeting to figure out how to get a 10-year-old package transferred to new infrastructure, throw it out and get something new. The upfront costs may be more, but they will pale against the long-term costs you will incur by not severing these ties.

Adjust your TCP/IP settings, particularly the window size

If you cannot seem to find any bottlenecks, and you are not getting the throughput on your WAN that you think you should, remember the bandwidth delay product and check your window size.

Implement WAN bandwidth saving models

There are lots of technologies out there that fundamentally change the model of networking and result in dramatically lower WAN utilization or latency. Some examples are terminal servers, content networking, WAFS, and Web services. You may also want to investigate your web of leased lines and costly WAN charges. Linking multiple sites with T1 lines, MPLS, and even Frame Relay used to be the only way to guarantee connectivity, but everything has changed since with improvements in technology. Rather than curse at your monthly WAN bill, it is high time to investigate your alternatives.