>Has anyone seen this before, or maybe give me some ammo to send to the Network boys to fix this problem or maybe this is normal for Novell.
>

Let me dust off my memory a little here. I seem to remember a client of mine a while back that was having an issue like this one. The were running a dual processor machine with 1Gig of RAM and things were really slow. Now the memory part. If it serves correctly we discovered 2 main problems that there Network guys had not. First they had about 6 24-port hubs all linked to the end of one another. If you were lucky enough to be on the first hub there was no problem. If you were down the line like on the last hub in the chain then you really had troubles. Each hub after the first one had to compete for that one line into the hub in front of it for their network requests. Kind of like going through a funnel into a funnel into a .... I thing you get the point. Second thing was with 1Gig of RAM they had either 256Meg or 512Meg set aside for cache, I don't really remember. But the interesting thing that we discovered in auditing the performance of the server was that no more than 32Meg(?), not sure if it was 16 or 32, was really being used. In Novell you can set aside RAM for cache but it won't get used until you tell Novell to use it. Once we changed these problems, the first one with the hub required more NIC cards in the server, they were satisfied with the performance.

HTH