I posted the following email to another Win2k Server Networking newsgroup
last week but got no response. Perhaps someone monitoring this one can
answer my question. If you have a remote office across a very slow WAN link,
is there a way to tweak a Win2k server to send SMB traffic optimized with
those users in mind? Will this improve their effective performance?
Sometimes Outlook, for instance, takes 5 minutes to open up their mailboxes.
Here's the original post, in case you want more info on the scenario.
Jon
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Good morning,
I have a central office and two remote offices connected via Frame Relay.
The port speed at the central office is 512k and at the remotes, 256k. The
CIR is 32k at the remotes with bursting to 384k. Our remote offices do not
seem to get anywhere near the burst speed and queries to the Exchange and SQL
servers at the central office often timeout. Effective bandwith appears to
hover near the CIR with occational bursts to 120k. It has been suggested
that I reconfigure the Win2k servers to run SMB in raw versus block mode.
All I've been able to uncover in the KB are references to WindowsNT regarding
this issue.
Any pointers to KB articles describing how to configure Windows 2000 servers
for optimal WAN traffic communication would be greatly appreciated.
The carrier, ATT, analyzed sniffer traces and determined that the PVCs
appear configured correctly.
If you look at this scenario and have another idea of what might be going
on, I'd certainly like to hear what you have to say.
Thanks in advance for any ideas!
Jon : )

I would start with that someone has mislead you about Frame Relay. For
example at the remote sites their port speed is 256k. You can NOT burst
above port speed. So there is no way you can burst to 384k. Next is your
CIR is usually set to HALF of port speed. This means you should have a CIR
of 128k on the 256k sites and 256k at the main site.

In my experience with Frame Relay it is a lie that you can "burst" to port
speed. CIR is the only thing that counts since that is the actual bandwidth
you are getting. Beware of "discard eligible packets" in your router stats.
Look at your routers and This is evidence your bandwidth is over subscribed
which is the case in FR sometimes a 100 to 1 [oversubscribed]. FR is shared
bandwidth. You share with all the other FR customers.

With this information you are trying to optimize a 32kbps connection [32k
CIR]. I had problems with 10pcs connecting to a server over a 96k CIR and
running applications. Number of apps would just barf. Might work for a week
or two but end up on the floor again. We went to PtP and have never looked
back.

I only found this:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/120642/EN-US/
but everything I saw was also under NT and dealt with server to server
communication not wskts to server comm over a wan.

If you take into consideration that Terminal Services wants a average of
23k-50k per session even going to TS won't help you with only 32k of
bandwidth.