Why is my transfer rate so slow when using “Open with Explorer”?

Question

I'm logged in on my SharePoint 2010 server machine (running Windows Server 2008 R2) and using the "Open with Explorer" feature in a document library to copy another full directory from a separate server running as a file server into my document library. Our network is full 1Gbps and these two machines are sitting right next to one another separated by less than ten feet of Cat-6 cable, yet my transfer speed starts below 100kbps and slowly degrades over time. How do I fix this?

Answer 1

Using the steps from this source will restore full connection speed.

1. In Internet Explorer, open the Tools menu, then click Internet Options.
2. Select the Connections tab.
3. Click the LAN Settings button.
4. Uncheck the “Automatically detect settings” box.
5. Click OK until you’re out of dialog hell.

This will need to be done on every machine that makes use of the "Open with Explorer" feature.

Answer 2

Unchecking the "Automatically detect settings" box worked perfectly for me. I had a transfer that was stating it would take 14 hours and as soon as I unchecked the option it changed to 6 hours and then subsequently finished in a matter of seconds.

Great work JonnyP

Answer 3

Are you certain that your hardware is up to speed for 2010? Can you check the CPU and Memory usage on both the web front end and the database server? Is a crawl running for search?

Also, if you are using Sql Express for your database, check to see how much RAM is being used as it is limited to 1GB that it will use. If you are at that limit then your DB is swapping to disk which would explain the performance degradation.