Network hub.

Hub or switch?

Obviously you'll be looking for something which can support the higher ethernet speeds - 100M or even gigabit.

(are any of the reputable brands actually slow?)

cheers, clive

Thanks Clive. Well he did say hub. He's running Sage s/w which since their latest upgrade, is running slow. Works fine on the server itself, but is slow on the network. According to them, the latest version, has many more functions than the previous version, hence the slowness, and they have recommended a faster hub. The Netgear one he's using at present, is about 3 years old. Mike.

Sounds more than a tad pants to me. Unless he's bought a really old dodgy netgear hub/switch back then, it should be able to run everything on full duplex, 100Mbit/s.

Depending on network traffic, a hub is a bad idea - you definitely want a switch, not a hub. But before you even go there it may well be worth checking that all client machines have full duplex connections at 100M and not 10M. Oh, and then I'd look at how much network traffic you actually get on the server as it may simply be maxing out the network card on the server.

you want a network switch as hubs are old skool! a switch if i remember right doesn't have all that 10/100mbit shit it should go at the max to whatever is shoved into it. switch is f*ck all really for a 4-9 port jobby. dunno if they started whacking switches into routers???

Thanks for that. It's definitely a hub he's running at present. I'll tell hin he needs a switch tomorrow. Mike.

Cheers. A few things to think about. I'll tell him to check tomorrow. There's got to be a bottleneck somewhere, as the problem only became noticeable after Sage was upgraded. Apart from generally running slowly, it's quite noticeable that the daily backup which is done on one w/s is taking about twice as long as it did before. Mike.

Unless the data size has grown by a factor of two this sounds like network congestion...