Evaluating Network Performance

Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 and Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 R2 will reach end of support on January 9, 2018. To stay supported, you will need to upgrade. For more information, see Resources to help you upgrade your Office 2007 servers and clients.

The overall performance of Communicator Web Access is affected by network performance, which depends on the following factors:

  • Device speed. How fast a device can route or filter packets.

  • Network speed. The bit rate of the network interfaces and connectivity devices or server ports.

  • Filtering. The type of filtering that is being performed on packets (the inspection of packets above level 3 of the OSI model). The higher the level of filtering, the greater the likelihood of degraded performance. If needed, additional CPU resources should be added to bring the performance back to desired levels.

  • Encryption. When encryption is used—for example, on VPN devices—the network traffic performance deteriorates. If this overhead proves to be too great and network performance falls below an acceptable level, additional CPU resources should be added to the devices that perform encryption in order help bring performance back to desired levels.

  • Number of devices. The latency that is introduced into the overall performance of the network increases as the number of devices on the network increases.

Examine your current network and determine if there are areas that may affect the performance of your Communicator Web Access deployment.