Network Shared Folders - Size Impact

Networking & Firewalls
1

Good morning everyone, hope you are all doing well.

I would love to get your input on folder sizes and do they affect network performance? The reason I ask and I might be wrong but I have a strong belief that large network shares severely impact application use and overall user experience.

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Here is a scenario: Company A is a manufacturing design company that deals with very intricate CAD designs, so part folders can be anywhere from 2-25GB in size. Company A has been in business for a very long time and their job numbers are in the thousands, the main “JOBS” folder is laden with say 250 jobs, the rest have been archived off the system, however the “JOBS” folder is sitting at 1.7TB of data and approx. 300K files.
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Ok now that you have the picture one thing users experience is the ability for the software to sometimes see this “JOBS” folder or even some folders within the “JOBS” folder, however when they open the folder through File Explorer everything is there. Do you think the shear volume of data is causing the application to struggle to refresh or possibly cache all the items? The problem is even worse if s user were offsite and they were trying to open this same “JOBS” folder while connected through VPN, in fact, they report they see NO folders under applications built in file explorer.

Any comments.

2

Need more info

What is hosting your network shares - operating system, memory etc

Firewall, type of vpn

You could try and move old jobs to an Archive Job smb share, so less folders and files in the main smb share

3

SMB was not designed to go over a VPN efficiently and lots of files in a fold issues a command to list those file making it take longer.

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