Hello! I was having the following setup : Server P1-133, 1GB, 32MB RAM running Novell 3.12, Nodes - two Diskless nodes with P1-133 & 16MB RAM, one PIV-Node with WIN-98. The above machines are connected by 8 port hub. Recently I upgraded my server to Celeron 1.7 CPU, 128 MB DDR RAM & 40 GB Hard disk with ASUS 845GL MB with built in LAN Card. I reinstalled Novell 3.12 Op.system with all latest patch & hdd driver patches. Now I am facing the speed/performance problem. The nodes will work fine for 2/3 hours & suddenly they will become very slow. The response from server will be very slow. I am mainly running dos based accounting s/w written in clipper. It will take abnormally long time to open/close files, saving record & taking out reports. Even listing of dir becomes slow. The above behaviour is abnormal & can occur after 1hr or 2/3 hours. Then I shut down the system & restart it, & it becomes okay. I have not changed any other wiring or setting except the server. My previous PI server was working fine & there was no speed problem. The speed problem in new server is occuring even if only one node is working. I tried to increase the RAM in server from 128 to 256 but there was no improvement Please help. Thanks.

It sounds as though you might be running into DMA vs. PIO problems. If your IDE driver is running PIO (the only mode for the driver included with NetWare 3.12), you will see your utilization climb to near 100%, hogging the time from your other processes. To overcome this, you might try and install the NetWare 3.12 NWPA Update Package, which includes updated versions of the IDE drivers. Just go to http://developer.novell.com/devres/storage/drivers/index.html and click on Update Your NetWare 3.12 or 4.11 Server to Work With NWPA, download the Package, and follow the installation instructions.