Performance of JPG horrible after recent security updates?

[John]

I have a small network, 100MB switched, with 4 nodes. The server is
Win2003EE, clients are XP Pro.

A couple/three week's ago, when browsing a folder of JPG images, performance
was zippy. Now, it takes 30 seconds or more for a single JPG image to come
up (image size averages about 1.4MB). During this time, nothing unusual on
the server in terms of memory, CPU, or disk. And, network utilization stays
under 5%.

The same files shared peer-to-peer between the two XP Pro boxes is extremely
fast (same as before). The same files accessed directly on the Windows 2003
console from it's own directory is extremely fast. It is only when the
files
are accessed from XP to 2003, and only recently that this started. I used
Network Monitor to capture packets, and didn't see anything obvious (though
I
admittedly am not an expert at reading packet captures).

Did a recent security patch change TCP Window Size parameters or anything
similar to cause this performance degradation?

I have seen other reported problems on the Internet reporting JPG
performance is slow. I believe it has nothing to do with JPG's themselves.
However, the way that XP caches thumbnails and things causes a lot of data
transfer over the network (more than say, streaming same-size MP3 files).
My
belief is this is a networking issue, independent of file type. But I could
be wrong.

Thanks in advance,

/John

 

[Charlie Tame]

If it's a clue we recently had one where IE stopped displaying .gifs but
Firefox was okay with them etc.

If I downloaded one of the .gifs I could open in irfanview, resave and then
IE was happy.

Turns out the prog used to create the original website gifs was not sticking
to the rules, we do not know quite why. One thing missing was the "Summary"
data which did appear in the irfanview saved copies.

Seems to me that maybe images being loaded by IE are being checked
differently or else the update has affected the rendering engine. Also the
MS image viewer thingy choked on the originals.

What this would have to do with network transfer I have no clue since my
local images behaved the same, however it does seem to suggest that
"Something" in the recent update had to do with the image processing.

If you don't have irfanview you could try that, just in case there's
something with the MS image viewer, IE and maybe something else.

Sorry not to be more help but you mentioned others' experiences after a
recent update, maybe someone can stick the pieces together.


Charlie

 

[John]

Thanks for the reply.

This issue was recently resolved. The Cat-5 cable for my server went bad.

Tough to troubleshoot, because you never think that a cable will work fine
for a long time then suddenly go bad. But, replacing the cable fixed the
problem immediately.

Thanks again,

/John

 

[Charlie Tame]

Really, how odd.... oh well>

Glad you got it fixed anyway.

Charlie