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tjobbins
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Shared folders horrendously slow

I have the latest WS 5.5.

All my guests are XP32, the host is also XP32 - 4gb ram, AMD X2 4800, with fast disks.

I find Shared folders are horrendously slow. When navigating through them in Explorer it can take 30 seconds before the folder contents display. Once I'm in the folder access is general quick, but if I leave it and come back a short while later (even as short as 1 minute later), and then try to do something (select the files, right click on a file, anything) Explorer will again freeze for 30 seconds before anything happens.

When I do eventually get to the point where I can copy a file, it seems fast enough. And I have pointed Symantec Ghost to the shared folder as its location to backup the drive, and the time it took seemed resonable (1.5 minutes to High compress and backup a 3gb drive). However the huge browse times make frequent use of these folders highly annoying.

I've searched and found numerous old posts reporting the same problem - but most of them have no replies. I take it therefore that this is an inherant problem with shared folders and they are not intended to be a replacement for a network share.

I'm going to use a network share mounted as a drive instead - I just thought I'd post this in case there is an word from VMWare as to whether it will be fixed in future, and as help for others if they experience the same issue.

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27 Replies
admin
Immortal
Immortal

For what it's worth, we believe we fixed something like this in the WS6 Tools. The problem we encountered had to do with Windows' concept of network providers. These are loaded into explorer via dlls and are responsible for translating the
stuff namespace into appropriate filesystem requests. Anyway, Windows likes to put LanmanWorkstation at the top of the list, which means it gets first crack to requests for
.host\Shared Folders.

Unfortunately, LanmanWorkstation also takes a very long time to timeout, which makes the first access to any share take forever (because LanmanWorkstation must time out, and only then does the HGFS provider get to run). Note that this should only affect share discovery, not file transfers.

For WS6, we worked around this by installing the HGFS provider at the top of the list. Check out HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\NetworkProvider\Order to see what I mean.

More information here:

http://www-1.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg21135684

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa378776.aspx

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dsoong
Contributor
Contributor

My guest OS is Linux. It is so slow it is unusable. This is on a new Dell D630 laptop. The same VM works fine on Dell D620 laptop. I It is still slow after restinalling the VMWare tools. It is copying a few KB about every 30 seconds.

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maj13205
Contributor
Contributor

Can you please tell me how to map a shared folder to a logical drive?

Thanx in advance

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0xG
Contributor
Contributor

Still a problem with WS 6.1 at least.

Yeah, PST files die unless you just use plain old SMB share...

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nextech
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Brian,

I had a similar problem, I posted the solution to this problem here:

http://communities.vmware.com/message/1191790#1191790

I hope this helps, I believe this should solve your problem. Please

close this thread out, and mark it as "Answered" and If you find

this answer helpful, please do take the time to award me the "Correct Answer" points.

Thank-you!

Mark

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Kadu123
Contributor
Contributor

This has annoyed me for ages and I have finally found the proper cause/solution:

This  slow performance, specially the 5-10 seconds delay between clicking on a  folder/file and actually getting it opened, happens because Widnows is  trying to access the share via NetBIOS protocol. Once the NBT attempt  fails windows reverts back to TCP, which then works OK.

So the solution is to disable netbios over TCP/IP on all network interfaces inside the Windows client.

Hope this helps more people out there.

For Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, and Windows 2000

  1. On the desktop, right-click My Network Places, and then click Properties.
  2. Right-click Local Area Connection, and  then click Properties
  3. In the Components checked are used by this connection list, double-click Internet Protocol (TCP/IP), click Advanced, and then click the WINS tab.

    Note In Windows XP and in Windows Server 2003, you must double-click Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) in the This connection uses the following items list.
  4. Click Disable NetBIOS over TCP/IP and then click OK three times.

For Windows Vista

  1. On the desktop, right-click Network, and then click Properties.
  2. Under Tasks, click Manage network connections.
  3. Right-click Local Area Connection, and  then click Properties
  4. In the This connection uses the following items list, double-click Internet Protocol Version 4 (TCP/IPv4), click Advanced, and then click the WINS tab.
  5. Click Disable NetBIOS over TCP/IP, and then click OK three times.

For Windows 7

  1. Click Start, and then click Control Panel.
  2. Under Network and Internet, click View network status and tasks.
  3. Click Change adapter settings.
  4. Right-click Local Area Connection, and then click Properties.
  5. In the This connection uses the following items list, double-click Internet Protocol Version 4 (TCP/IPv4), click           Advanced, and then click the WINS tab.
  6. Click Disable NetBIOS over TCP/IP, and then click OK three times.
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vmwarejw
Contributor
Contributor

This is really bad advice. Don't just take a sledgehammer and disable NetBIOS "on all network interfaces inside the Windows client". There are reason for keeping NetBIOS active and I have several VMs that have it enabled and that do not suffer from any performance degradation while browsing the guest file system as a share to the host.

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avzuquete
Contributor
Contributor

Thanks a lot! My normal working environment is a Windows VM running over another Windows and all my data is shared with the host via VMWare shares. And sometimes the creation of a folder would take something like 20 seconds, absolutely insane!
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