How large are we talking. None of those switches you mentioned have any layer 3 capabilities so i would assume the network is all flat layer 2. Depending how many machines we are talking about the first thing that comes to mind is broadcast traffic. Windows is the worst fort this. If you have enough machines tying up bandwidth with broadcast traffic the rest of the network can appear sluggish. I have seen a few networks that have suffered from this. A simple layer 3 switch to help breakup the broadcast domains can fix things up easily.

 

What do the utilization counters for each port indicate on the 5324's?

Thank you so much for answering!

 

We have a total of 15 switches on this one network.  I thought that was a bit excessive myself.  I'm not sure which counter you are refering to, but under the table views I see a Utilization Summary and in the Interface Utilization I only see zeros.  Unicast Receive has high numbers, 90 to 100 and Error Packets Recieved is zero.

 

I have one small group of users that use a server for a certain application and they are always complaining about slowness, especially when printing.  More times than not they cannot print at all it gets so bad.  The server was several switches over from them.  For a test I put them and the server on the same switch (had to stick the server in the wiring closet - hot I know!) and everything went back to normal.  Their printing was blazingly fast, but after a week or two its slowed back down.

How exactly are these switches connected? are they "daisy chained" or do they all tie back to central core switches? The next step i would take would be to download a traffic sniffer like ethereal and sniff the traffic on the network. You will be able to analyze how much of it is actual production traffic as opposed to broadcast traffic. You may even find a couple of devices or computers that are causing all the problem.

 

Good luck.

yes they are all daisey chained to one or another, but they all do return to a 5324 switch on the first floor via fiber and from there it is connected to another switch across the road via fiber.  I have a diagram in pdf of the switches how they are connected if anyone is interested in seeing it.  It might make more sense.

 

I feel it has to be traffic or something, because it doesn't make sense that they have this problem while being on the same switch.

The 5324 has flowcontrol disabled by default.  Most NICs and switches have it enabled by default.  I would try enabling flowcontrol on all the 5324s to see if this improves your network performance.

 

console> enable

console# config

console (config)# interface range ethernet all

console (config-if)# flowcontrol on

 

 

is that the same as QOS from the browser interface?

It's under "Port Configuration" on the webUI.

ok thanks.  I have all of them enabled.  Are there any of settings I should change from the default setting to improve the traffic flow?  Broadcast Control is disabled too, should that be enabled?

 

So far it seems to have improved the network some.

You can try enabling Broadcast Storm control.  This will help if it is Broadcast packets that are overwhelming your network.

ok. I will try that too.  Question, what is Admin speed on port configuration?  just curious!

When autonegotiation is disabled, the speed of the port is set to the "Admin Speed".