One problem we have had at work with our (old) Sonicwall SSL VPN (heck even IPsec is slow on those for us) is that VPN speeds are truly awful. We have some users that use an application called "Spreadsheet Server" that connects to a database and loads information from that database into excel spreadsheets, and we by far get the most complaints from them. Now this app isn't very high performance as it is... even when tested over our LAN sometimes some of their spreadsheets take a solid minute of loading before they are ready to work on; but over the VPN this increases dramatically.. 15 minutes+, some don't even load at all. Essentially unusable.
It is my assumption the type of data transfer being used by this application is similar to a small block size random read/write transfer that one would normally test against hard drives/SSD's, for example when running CrystalDiskMark against our file server for example, we'll see speeds drop from 9MB/s over LAN, to like 0.05 MB/s over the VPN, and that's with us being on a 300/300mbps connection, and me testing at home with gigabit internet...and all of this over SMB 3.. sequentials aren't bad over the VPN, not great but acceptable. So it's almost like those small-block size transfers also affect the network in some way.. not just the hard drives on the server itself.
I'm a bit limited in my knowledge of what is available in terms of solutions for this issue. Whether it be a better VPN, or should we rethink everything entirely? Some of what we do here is pretty old fashioned so I'm all ears. Basically bottom line, my question is, how can we make ourselves not be the bottleneck for remote network access?
No comments:
Post a Comment