Active Directory - workstations bad performance

Question

Hello everybody

We have a perfomance problem with some of the windows 10 workstations conected to our domain (Windows Server 2012 R2) due to poor connection.

We have one domain (2 DC) with offices in several cities / small villages of a small region.
The workstations of most of these offices connect and perform well. However, some of the offices are
located in very small and remote villages with poor data connections (some of them around 3 MBps).
These offices have usually only 1 or 2 workstations.

Before joining the domain, those remote locations would work with much older workstations running on windowsXP or windows7 and no domain.
We recently replaced the old workstations with brandnew ones running on Windows10 and joined the domain.
To our suprise, people in these locations now tell us that they were doing much better before.
The only cause we can think of is the extra hidden traffic generated by the domain.

If so, is there a way to configure these workstations in the Active Directory (in Sites and Services for example),
so that the domain minimizes the amount of traffic generated for those locations?

By the way, our first attempt was to try to improve the speed of those connections, but unfortunately that doesn't seem to be an option right now.

Thank you very much in advance

Answer 1

Hello,

Note that AD/Sites&Services can only be helpful for sites containing Domain controllers. For other sites, the best option is to associate their subnets to the closest site containing a DC.

You will not have a lot of other options to optimize these sites:

• The most important thing could be to update GPO changing the interval of application: https://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/31623.modify-group-policy-refresh-interval-for-computers.aspx
• It also possible to modify the computer password expiration:

https://adsecurity.org/?p=280

• Optimize DNS/Updates/search/cache

Regards,

Answer 2

Hi TDeman

Your response looks really good to me :)
We are going to try it out asap

Thank you so much for your quick reply

Kind regards

Javier