Poor performance with Archived projects on Time Capsule

Question

I work in an educational environment where multiple students share four iMacs (all 2008 models or newer, with 2 or 4 GB of RAM on each machine). When a student is done working on a project for the day they save it as an Archive to a Time Capsule, which is shared by every computer on the network, so that they can access it on any of the computers in the building The problem is that often times, even on projects with only 4 or 6 tracks, the load time is extremely slow from the Time Capsule (10 or more minutes for a 11 MB project yesterday) and once loaded the same projects frequently give the "too many tracks" error and will not play and are thus useless. I tried temporarily moving the project to the HD of the computer in use, but this also took a long time and didn't really solve the problem.
Is it possible we're having bandwidth issues? I could see how this would slow the load time, but not playback once loaded. Our ISP plan is rather slow... probably no more than 5 Mbps and it's shared between 6 or 7 computers at a time.
Any other thoughts or solutions? It's slowed some of our students progress to a halt.

Answer 1

1 megabyte per minute is extremely slow in terms of transferring or opening a file.
it is, but assuming you have more than one machine connected to it, the bandwidth is being split between every machine that's accessing it. as well, it's not designed for what you seem to have purposed it... it's a backup drive, not a working drive (which would also mean you have no backups)
once the Archived project is loaded, shouldn't it no longer be referring wirelessly back to the TC
i've never studied how much disk access GB utilizes, but OS X in general does a lot. the latency alone across that network would have to be huge, and to add to the problem, i doubt there's a 7200RPM drive in the TC.
looking at it anotehr way, we always recommend firewire drives due to the bandwidth problems associated with the file sizes of audio or video data (even USB 2.0 does not have the sustained throughput that FW does). as a quick off-the-top-of-my-head calculation, firewire 400 offers around 50MB/s throughput. 802.11n, the fastest of the current wireless specs, offers around 6.75MB/s (theoretically up to around 15MB/s, but i think that requires multi-channel usage). that's a HUGE difference, and when you're moving lots of data, it's very relevant.