Poor performance with MS Access on Isilon - Celerra good

Question

Yeah, sounded cave man like..

Had a user complain about their files being "slow" after their data was migrated to the Isilon. I visted the users and watched them open the file.

User 1 - MS Excel, performance was about what I expected - acceptable.to me, but may warrant some additional research.

HOWEVER,

User 2 - MS ACCESS performance was as follows.

When file was copied to her desktop, it was opened almost instant. (expected)
I had her copy the file to a Celerra share and open it there. Took maybe 5 seconds.
I had her open the file from the Isilon and it was no less than 15 or 20 seconds to open. She then commented that its slow just navigating through the DB, which makes it almost unusalbe to her.

Configuration is a 7 node X400 cluster. 6 of the nodes have both 10GB connections in use. 7th node is a storage node only.

Before I open a performance case are there any known issues with MS Access or other Office products that may have issues with Isilon?

Thanks,

DHoffman2 · Accepted Answer

I had turned oplocks off on this share and made no difference.  I opened a case with Support and supplied them with PCAP log from a session with that client.  I was instructed to turn oplocks back on and run the test again.  The performance was what I would consider 'much much faster'.  That PCAP log was uploaded and am still waiting for feedback.  I'm also looking for another user to see if the problem persists with all users who acces this file or some.

peglarr · Answer

While I would encourage you to open a case, what you've described leads me to think that your clients may benefit by disabling oplocks. There are quite a few considerations to gauge before taking that step, though, including OneFS revision and how other clients using that share would react to disabling oplocks. Another thing to look at is packet signing, as well as your OneFS configuration w.r.t. random I/O handling.

The ultimate way to determine is to get a packet capture and see if any STATUS_INVALID_HANDLE responses are being sent during oplock dialogue, amongst other things. But again I would encourage you to open a ticket.

Cheers

Rob

Narahari1 · Answer

Check the office version you are running is updated with latest MS office patch bundle. I've had this issue before and patch update fixed it. I've also experienced issues with excel when the files are placed in "my documents" folder with offline filesync enabled (MS-sync center), try storing the files directly on NAS and check the performance.

These are the issues I've run into for different versions of excel and the solutions.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/324491

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/813973

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2589410

http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Search/en-US/office?query=access%20denied%20contact%20your%20administrator%20error&Refinement=8&ac=4

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Poor performance with MS Access on Isilon - Celerra good

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