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Experiencing poor networking performance on Windows 2003 server with SP1 or SP2 installed? Can't make sql connections to some servers? RDP doesn't work? RPC communication failure messages? But permissions are totally fine. Read on to learn more.

We have been having slow networking performance with backups to UNC shares where small database would backup just fine, but larger databases would more often than not fail with network name not available error. We even switched to an Isilon box for backups and failures decreased, but did not disappear. Initially we were blaming it on our Domain switch, but in many cases that could be ruled out, but nothing else could. I did a pack trace on my own machine and it wasn't sending my windows authentication packets to the remote machine and on a computer next to mine it would.

In all, we have spent hundreds of hours trying to figure out what is going on and in the end we just ran this command to disable Scalable Networking Pack features in Windows Server 2003:

Netsh int ip set chimney DISABLED

This is a one time, instant setting. I saw an increase in performance of SQL backups going to UNC share increase by a factor of 3 (6 hours to 3)! We use HP servers in our environment and did upgrade NIC drivers, but this didn't help.

Microsoft KB 945977 snippet: After applying Service Pack 2 on your Windows Server 2003 computer, you may experience one or more of the following symptoms:

1. If it is an Exchange server, Exchange Queues become clogged in the MAPI delivery queue. Messages get stuck in this queue and cannot be delivered properly.
2. ActiveSync may not work on the Exchange Server 2003.
3. For the IIS server, browsing the Public and/or Default Website in IIS results in error "Page cannot be displayed".
4. Non-Paged Pool (KERNEL) memory becomes exhausted.
5. For a printer server, the printing job may be partially missing.
6. For a SQL server, if you have an application that connects to SQL Server by using TCP/IP, you may intermittently receive one of the following error messages:
Error message 1
[Microsoft][ODBC SQL Server Driver][DBNETLIB] General Network error. Check your network documentation

Error message 2
ERROR [08S01] [Microsoft][SQL Native Client]Communication link failure

Error message 3
System.Data.SqlClient.SqlException: A transport-level error has occurred when sending the request to the server. (provider: TCP Provider, error: 0 - An existing connection was forcibly closed by the remote host.)

Other error messages in SQL, trying to connect to server in different domain using windows authentication (works with SQL authentication):
Failed to connect to server ANALYTICS  Login failed for user ''. The user is not associated with a trusted SQL server connection.

References:

• http://support.microsoft.com/kb/936594 - Full list of symptoms
• http://support.microsoft.com/kb/945977 - Other symptoms
• http://support.microsoft.com/kb/912222 - Scalable Networking Pack release
• http://msexchangeteam.com/archive/2007/07/18/446400.aspx - Exchange admins are also seeing the same issue.