Linking files over a network

Question

Hi Everyone,
I should start by saying that my background is entirely in Windows environments and I have effectively no technical knowledge of OS:X or any Adobe products.  I work for a company that recently decided to buy 2 Macs for their marketing department to use various programs.
The issue we have is that when using InDesign with files hosted on the network, if you select high display performance the program becomes nearly unusably slow.  It works without issue on normal display performance.  I looked at all of the linked files and in total it's ~11MB worth of pictures.  Some docs have upwards of 20MB.  We've taken docs that are the same size with all of the links residing on the local machine and it works normally.
The people using them seem to be familiar enough with Macs and InDesign, and they think that this is abnormal.  I called Adobe support and they said they don't support linking files from network locations.  I'm not sure if ID is supposed to handle this well on high display, or if it's just too much information going across the network, or what.
Version is CS5.  Downloaded all updates.  Connected via cable, not wireless.  The server hosting the files is our Win2008 file server located on the same floor. Let me know if you'd like any more info.
Any help is greatly appreciated.
-Max

Answer 1

I assumed that, but I called 3 different times (they even made me purchase a support contract, even after buying the Master Suite) and then told me they don't support it.  It was pretty fun.
Good times.
In this case, when they say "We don't support it," they mean "we've tested it, and it works pretty well, but we can't test it in all circumstances, and some people out there are going to have weird networks, so whenever someone calls our tech support line with a problem, and they're linking over a network, we can get 'em off the phone really fast, thereby saving a bunch of money in tech-support wages on what could have been a three-hour network-diagnosis call."
So, "we don't support it" doesn't mean it doesn't work, but it does mean that their first-line support people won't talk about it.
I work in Typical display mode over our (slow, flaky) network with files stored on our (slow, flaky) NAS, all the time, without issue. When I want to work in High Quality mode, I save, package, move my links local, and re-open. My hunch is that working in high-res display causes data to be streamed straight off the hard drive. When sharing a NAS with n other people, it needn't even be a network hiccup killing my performance, it could be the drive throughput, another user or five trying to access data on the same platter, and so on.
The people using them seem to be familiar enough with Macs and InDesign,
and they think that this is abnormal.  I called Adobe support and they
said they don't support linking files from network locations.  I'm not
sure if ID is supposed to handle this well on high display, or if it's
just too much information going across the network, or what.
Live Draw (is that's what it's called? I'm still not much of a CS5 user) is a performance killer even when you have eight gigs of RAM and ultra-fast hard drives with gigantic caches. Have your users turned it off yet? That's the first thing to try. Next would be to compare performance between local vs. remote and typical vs. high quality.
edit: for "High Quality mode"