Author / Simon Doy

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Posts by Simon Doy

I am an avid SharePoint enthusiast who works as an Independent SharePoint Consultant based in Leeds, United Kingdom. I am one of the organisers of the Yorkshire SharePoint User Group in the United Kingdom. I have been designing and building SharePoint solutions since 2006.
by Simon Doy

Terrible VMWare Server Guest Network Performance


With SharePoint 2010 almost out, I started building a new development server using VMWare Server 2.0 running on a Windows 2008 R2 host. The details of the build will be posted on here later.
However, one of the biggest problems I faced was getting software installed on the guests. Currently I am trying to install SQL Server 2008 which was take an extrodinary longtime to install, so much so that I thought it was hanging. Eventually I decided to copy over the setup files to the guest machine. Originally the installer had been run from a share on the host, it was only when I started the copy did the problem become apparent.

The file copy speed was 10kb/s!! Obviously this is rather slow and I started to do some investigation.

There were a number of posts relating to TCP Offloading on the VMWare site however the fixes had no effect. I was disabling the TCP offloading within the guest on the Intel Pro e1000 driver.

However, it was this set of posts which lead me to solving the problem:
http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/winserverhyperv/thread/bdc40358-45c8-4c4b-883b-a695f382e01a

Basically rather than disabling it on the guest you need to disable it on the host. My guest machines are all setup to use bridged networking so I disabled the TCP Offloading / Large Send Offloading (v4) for the Realtek device using Start->Network->Network and Sharing Centre. Click on the Local Network Connection->Properties->Configure (under network adapter)->Advanced->Large Send Offloading (v4) = Disabled.

Anyway hope that helps anyone else who is experiencing similar problems.

Whilst I write this post the SQL Server setup files have copied over in less than 10 mins (instead of 3 to 4 hours hurrah!)

by Simon Doy

>SharePoint Memory Leak (one for the geeks)


>

Introduction

Todd Carter has found a core issue with SharePoint 2007 relating to the way that memory is disposed. Over the past couple of years memory management has become quite a hot topic and best practises have been published such as ensuring that you dispose of certain SharePoint objects (e.g. SPSite and SPWeb) after using them. These discoveries have lead to tools such SPDisposeCheck being released.

Todd however thought there was more to it and has investigated into SharePoint’s memory usage even further and uncovered a bigger issue.

An interesting article delving into the internals of Sharepoint, explaining the problem and then providing a workaround, a full fix is due shortly.

Funnily enough SharePoint 2010 does not seem to suffer from this problem, maybe thats a good reason for a client to upgrade!

http://todd-carter.com/post/2010/02/08/SharePointe28099s-Sasquatch-Memory-Leak.aspx