Apr 16 2012

Slow Opening of Office Files through a Network

Published by at 10:37 pm under Windows

Your Excel files on remote networks take up to 2 minutes to load? You think there’s something wrong with your VPN or you need to tune Office? Not at all, here’s how to load your files in just a few seconds!
 
I couldn’t understand why my remote files were so slow to open from a Windows shared folder, Excel in particular but many others as well like Word or PDF files.
Till I opened files hosted on a Windows 2008 Server from a Windows 7 machine.
 
Here’s the trick:
Performance issues, in particular latency on WAN networks arise mostly with the SMB 1.0 protocol. SMB2 was introduced by Microsoft in Windows Vista and enhanced in Windows 7 and 2008 Server later on.
SMB2 is less “chatty”, sends requests before the previous response is received, and allows larger block sizes, among other improvements.
 
At the end of the day, the most important is the gain while opening remote files: it is SO much faster!
Only constraint, both client and server must support SMB2. In other cases, SMB1 will be used. You now know what you’re gonna have to do: upgrade to Windows 7 and 2008 Server.


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