Network delays & computer freezing

Question

Is anyone aware of an application I might be able to use to record or data-log network delays? Or failing that, would it be feasible to write such a program?

I work for a big corporation who have recently deployed a remote file management platform which is causing severe productivity issues for staff in our branch. We work direct to a server, and every time a file is saved now, there is a significant delay (generally between 5-15 seconds, but sometimes timing out all together). Everything is just extremely unresponsive & slow, and it makes people avoid saving files so often, so quite frequently, when crashes occur, quite a bit of work is lost.

And these delays don't only occur on save operations. They also occur on navigating the network file structure. 2-3 seconds pause / outage between each folder-hop is incredibly frustrating, and adds up to a lot of time when you add it all up.

So when these delays occurs, it freezes out the rest of the system. Clicking anywhere on screen or on another application does nothing until the delay has passed its course.

What I am trying to do is to have some sort of data-logger running which records the cumulative duration of these outages. The idea is to use it for a bit, and then take the issue higher with evidence of the percentage of lost time due to this problem.

I suspect this percentage to be a surprising one to managers. They appear to be holding their heads in the sand and pretending like it only takes away a couple of minutes a day. Going by my rough estimates, we should be talking hours lost per day (per employee), not minutes. :/

Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

You could check if the process is responding using C#. Just modify the answer from the other question to check for the name of the application (or the process id, if possible with that C# API) and sum up the waiting times.

This might be a bit imprecise, because Windows will give a process a grace period until it declares it "not responding", but depending on the waiting times might be enough to make your point.

Answer 2

I'm not sure how your remote file management platform works. In the easiest scenario where you can access files directly on the platform you could just create a simple script that opens files, navigates the file system and lists containing dirs/files.

In case it's something more intricate, I would suggest to use a tool like wireshark to capture the network traffice, filter out the relavant packets and do some analysis on their delay. I'm not sure if this can be done directly in wireshark otherwise I'd suggest to export it as a spreadsheet csv and do you analysis on that.