Changing my router to gigabit helped AC responsiveness a lot in my office.
It only helps if the client-machines can do gigabit though right? Our main machine is new and has 10/100/1000 but our laptops are older and have only 10/100. I'm fine with throwing in a gigabit router, but it doesn't seem like it would help until I upgrade the laptops to something newer.
I'm most curious about the 14 second login time
from the main machine. That seems really wrong if other people are seeing 4 second login times from anywhere. Although I take that with a grain of salt, the people responding to this thread probably have the most invested in infrastructure and have it most tweaked. I wonder what a typical login time is.
We got our main machine May 2012 so it's fairly new. It's not a server but did cost $5k and seems at least competent: Dell T5500, Six Core Xeon 2.4Ghz, 24GB RAM, 2 x 1TB SATA 3.0Gb/s 7200 RPM drives RAID 1. It was a big step up from our old main machine.
I haven't tried any of the many suggestions here yet, so those are all on my todo list.
