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Guidance on Latency and Bandwidth for SharePoint 2010

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When planning for a SharePoint deployment one of the key aspects to consider is network latency and bandwidth. These two parameters have to be examined wheather you are looking at a centralized deployment or distributed deployment.

So what is bandwidth and latency??

Bandwidth is the amount of data that you can send through the wire. For example 1Mbps stands for 1MB of data being sent per second through the wire.

Latency is the time taken by the data ( or packet) to travel from source to destination. For example : If you are located in Australia and are opening a SharePoint site which is hosted in Seattle ( USA) and if it takes 1/10th of a second to open that page, then the network latency between your machine and the machine hosting the site is 1/10th of a second. ( Do not forget to divide the round-trip result by two, because all measures are one way only, not round-trip. )

For SharePoint deployment we have some guidelines to consider with respect to bandwidth and latency. Below table summaries with different scenarios.

Considering the same example : If you are located in Australia and are opening a SharePoint site which is hosted in Seattle ( USA) then you should have a network bandwidth through which you can send up to 1.5 MB of data per second and you should be able to access the site with in 100 milli second.

No front-end Web server or application server should have more than 1 millisecond (ms) of latency between it and the database server. In practice, this generally means that you should keep all the servers in a farm in the same data center.

With respect to backup/restore of database in SharePoint 2010, network drives with 1 millisecond or less latency between them and the database server will perform well.

A simple way to know your latency is to use ping.exe.

Hope the information was simple to understand.

Comments

  • Anonymous
    September 26, 2013
    1Mbps is 1 Mega BIT per second - that means it would take 8 seconds to send 1 Mega BYTE (1 MB) of data, not 1 second.....

  • Anonymous
    July 29, 2014
    I agree with Rahul. Despite the writing is interesting. 1Mbps is not equal to pass a 1MB file in a second. You are talking about 1 Mega bit per secong and 1 Mega Bytes file. On the other hand, you need to add some bites for signaling.

  • Anonymous
    June 30, 2015
    I guess having a site trying to access the SharePoint portal using a 128Kbps/via satellite connection will have problems due to latency and lesser bandwidth.. right? I have a customer that is trying to access our site without success but does get the login prompt when typing the url for it.