Windows 2000 Advanced Server - Optimal Number of Clients

[Geron]

Hello,

Since the network went up, I've been running into network performance dips all the time. At our institution we have one Dell Poweredge server with dual 1GHz PIII's and 1GB RAM running Windows 2000 Advanced Server SP2. We have approximately 200 clients running off this server (all 1GHz Dell PIII 1GHz's on Windows XP Pro), however all of the applications are run from the clients. The server is being used for authentication, DHCP, DNS, print spooling for 25 printers, active directory services for 400 users, and some other services as well. I spoke with a friend of mine who is a systems analyst at a medium sized company in Toronto, and he suggested that the server was being overworked having 200 clients and 25 printers to handle. He suggested a setup where the main server was used mainly for authentication and then a handful of other servers were used underneath the main one to distribute the load and other tasks such as DHCP DNS and active directory. What do you guys think? Could the performance problems be an overworked server? The 3rd party systems analyst we hired seems to think it is line degradation somewhere in the building, however our switches and drops were inspected and determined to be of excellent quality.

The fibre we installed to link the switch rooms helped with some of the performance, but there is still a problem, especially at peak times and when lots of print jobs are spooling.

What do you guys suggest?

Thanks,
Geron

[Great_One]

To identify where the actual problem is, i would first setup some perfomace counters on the server and monitor them at peak times. i would set up some counters for cpu utilization, paging file, disk access, and maybe some network i/o counters.
determine if its a server problem first, then move out to the network and explore further if necessary.

[Dave22]

I would do what Great_One says first. Make sure of what you're dealing with (ie: network layer problems, server load problems, etc)

Also, when you say "other services", what exactly are those services?

Oh, and if you don't need IIS, uninstall it or shut down the services and set them to Manual.