I'm running a network with a couple of Win7 machines (and others, but they're largely idle in this context). The two machines are similar in performance (one is a dual twin core 2.4GHz x64 and the other is a quadcore 2.4GHz x64). Disk transfer rate on both machines is the same (5.7) I've a program which reads word files (using OpenXML) and processes them. A typical run accesses 450 or so files. When I run the program on the machine which has the files on, it takes about 800 seconds. When I run the program on the machine on the other end of the network cable it takes 1200 seconds. I'm presuming that this performance difference is due to the network. Now the network is 1Gbps (and distances are measured in feet) and so in theory it should be able to support the full data rate of the hard disk. WHat I would like to know is what I can do (in terms of setting up read-ahead caching or something similar) to improve the performance of the machine on the other end of the network to something nearer that of the machine with the hard disc in. Hope this makes sense and someone can help! IainIain Downs

The performance is determined not only by the CPUs, but also other hardware. The hard drive is one of the most important device in this case. The differences of the north chipsets and the memory can also be reasons. In this case we cannot change the performance only by working on the system and software. You can disable all antiviruses, firewalls and non-Microsoft background programs, then check if the performance is improved. If not, we may consider that it is the hardware configurations which effect the performances.Please remember to click Mark as Answer on the post that helps you, and to click Unmark as Answer if a marked post does not actually answer your question. This can be beneficial to other community members reading the thread.

Thanks for your answer Arthur. I don't think I was very clear with my question, though. I have a Windows7 machine which has a hard disc (call it 'machine1'). When I run a program on this machine accessing the hard disc directly (or through it's network share name, but on the same machine) it takes 800 seconds or so. It accesses 470 files with a total of 250MB. If I run the same program on another Windows 7 machine (machine2) accessing the hard disc on machine1 via my 1GBp network it takes half again as long. machine2 is similar in configuration to machine1 in terms of CPU type and speed (and gives very similar CPU and Memory performance measures on the Windows system rating page). My assumption is that the performance difference is due to the latency of accessing the hard disk on machine1 across the network and I wanted to know if there was any way in which I could adjust the read-ahead caching and such similar optimisations to tune this for better performance. IainIain Downs