Need Troubleshooting help in a networked workflow

[pictureday]

The scenario: Mac Based. 10.6.8. Mix on Intel 2Ghz to 2.4Ghz iMacs and a Mac Pro. All connecting over gigibit ethernet to a RAID5 file server.

PM 4.6.7

We deal with folders of around 250 RAW images.
Our four iMacs will open folders over the network in order to flag images (1star for slates, 4stars for selected shot) Some workstations are flagging while others are retouching images in other folders.

We have good days where all the workstations are performing well. Open a folder and in a reasonable amount of time the images load.

We have bad days where a couple of workstation will spend long periods with the Marble of Doom, The beach ball of "please wait."

We are looking for correlations that could shed light on why the bad days.

When going slow it seems as if PM is lagging in the reading in of the images into a cache or buffer.

We assume that when the names are in red, they are preview and go black when in the local cache.

Any insight that could be provided on what conditions might be causing the slow down would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks.

[Kirk Baker]

The scenario: Mac Based. 10.6.8. Mix on Intel 2Ghz to 2.4Ghz iMacs and a Mac Pro. All connecting over gigibit ethernet to a RAID5 file server.

PM 4.6.7

We deal with folders of around 250 RAW images.
Our four iMacs will open folders over the network in order to flag images (1star for slates, 4stars for selected shot) Some workstations are flagging while others are retouching images in other folders.

We have good days where all the workstations are performing well. Open a folder and in a reasonable amount of time the images load.

We have bad days where a couple of workstation will spend long periods with the Marble of Doom, The beach ball of "please wait."

We are looking for correlations that could shed light on why the bad days.

When going slow it seems as if PM is lagging in the reading in of the images into a cache or buffer.

We assume that when the names are in red, they are preview and go black when in the local cache.

Any insight that could be provided on what conditions might be causing the slow down would be greatly appreciated.

I honestly wouldn't know what would be the cause for why it would be slow sometimes.  Perhaps you have an IT person on staff that could checkout your network and see why requests for data from the server aren't being fulfilled in a timely manner?

-Kirk