Tuesday, 20 April 2010

Slow file copy over LAN with Windows 7

If you search Google regarding this then you find that lots of people have this problem. I need to copy a 20GB Microsoft SQL Server backup file across the network each night from Server 2008 to a new Windows 7 Professional x64 box with 4GB RAM - this was taking in the region of 7 hours!

If I copy the same file to my Vista Ultimate x86 laptop it takes 40 minutes, that's more like it, after all we do have a gigabit LAN.

After reading several forums I found 5 main (possible) resolutions to this:
  1. Disable TCP auto tuning by running this command with administrator privileges: netsh int tcp set global autotuninglevel=disabled (you can set is back again with =normal).
  2. Turn off the Remote Differential Compression feature. Go to Control Panel, Programs and Features, Turn Windows features on or off, switch off RDC.
  3. In the same place, also switch off Windows Meeting Space.
  4. In networking, switch off IPv6 support.
  5. Stop and disable the Superfetch service and reboot.
I took steps 1, 2 and 5 but I think that 5 made the most impact. Now the same 20GB file copies over the LAN to the Windows 7 machine in 18 minutes! Looks like I may need to apply these settings to Vista.

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