File Server Role: Slow access for "opened files" and slow Explorer browsing

Question

Since we migrated our fileserver from Windows Server 2008 R2 to Windows Server 2012 we are facing two major problems:
1. Opening files which are already opened by other users takes about 1 minute before the file actually opens. This is not only for Office files such as Excel and Word, but also for other (not office) files. Again, this problem only rises when the file(s)
is/are already opened by another user. There seems to be a sort of "Lock" check time which is about 45 to 60 seconds.
2. The other problem is browsing via Explorer through the network drive (all clients are Windows 7 clients). Half of the time there is some kind of "hick up" with displaying the results of the folder. I cannot figure out a patern, but if there
is no "hick up" then browsing is very fast (also in the busiest times of the working day)... If there is a "hick up" the result can take about 50 seconds to display the content of a folder.
I suspect the SMB implementation / settings of Windows Server 2012 which are causing the problems...
Things I tried:
1. Changed the Oplocks wait time to 10 seconds (which is the minimum). The result is that openening files does indeed go some faster (still taking about 45 seconds).
2. Disabled SMB2: the result is that browsing is fast... Opening files does go faster. BUT: we are then facing other problems like some files are not able to open... This setting was, after getting a lot of complaints from the users, changed back to enabled
SMB2.
3. Within the NIC card properties I disabled "QoS packet Scheduler", "Link-Layer Topology Discovery Mapper I/O Driver", "Link-Layer Topology Discovery Responder" and IPv6 (as we only use IPv4).
All above with not the promising results.
The server is a dedicated (virtual machine on vSphere 5.1) fileserver.
Please Advice since this is not workable, and we have postponed the migration of the fileserver for our aother location.

Answer 1

Hi Dave,
I suggest you disable all third party applications like Anti-Virus application to test if it could reduce the waiting time when accessing a file.
Here are some related threads below that could be useful to you:
DFS Slowness when Opening Microsoft Documents and Excel Spreadsheets
http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/windowsserver/en-US/61ec9a99-0027-44cb-815c-0da9276c1c96/dfs-slowness-when-opening-microsoft-documents-and-excel-spreadsheets?forum=winservergen
Opening files over network takes long time
http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/windows/en-US/c8ddb65f-8a17-4cee-afd4-dfc09e99d562/opening-files-over-network-takes-long-time?forum=w7itpronetworking
opening folder or file takes over a minute on Windows 2008R2 File server
http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/windowsserver/en-US/b9aa98c4-3ef7-4e6d-810d-6099e72b33f6/opening-folder-or-file-takes-over-a-minute-on-windows-2008r2-file-server?forum=winserverfiles
Best Regards,
Amy Wang