What is Lanmanworkstation

Fileserving in Windows environments is usually of critical importance. After all, if you can't reach your files or have to wait five minutes every time you browse a share, the heat starts to build up in the IT department.

File serving is more than just saving a file to your home directory. I wrote a two-part article on MSTerminalServices.org on file serving and Terminal server environments. I suggest you read that article (Part 1 and Part 2 ) first to get a feel for the proper context of this article.

One of the main reasons I wrote that article is that fileserving can easily become a bottleneck if not configured properly, especially in Terminal Server environments.

To solve these performance problems, you sometimes have to tune the fileserver (lanmanserver) and the “fileserver-client” (lanmanworkstation). However, this isn’t for the faint of heart and can cause huge problems if you do it wrong. Unfortunately, documentation on these tuning parameters is rather scarce.

So in this article, I’ll try to explain what the important parameters are, what they do, and how they relate to each other. Once you know this, you'll be able to tune your fileserving environments yourself.

Before we jump into this, please note that there are also a great deal optimizations that you can do in the "Terminal Server Terminal Server Client" hemisphere. Although the basic fileserving principles also apply in that area, this article is not meant to help you perform those optimizations. Also, there is a lot of additional tweaking you can do in other parts of the (Terminal Server) registry. I've purposely left these optimizations out because I wanted this article to focus on the performance of Fileserving components only.

Also read : what is lanman server