offlinefiles SlowLinkSpeed registry key

Offline files provides a configurable setting called Slow Link policy, which, if enabled, will reduce the network traffic between client and server. Suppose you are working from home and are connected to your office network. If your network connection is very slow, the time CSC takes to synchronize the local cache with the server files will be huge. In such cases, you might want to disable the synchronization and just work with local copies. Though you can disconnect your machine from network and switch to offline mode intentionally, other applications which needs to access network will have problem. In such cases, you can configure slow link policy such that if the network speed falls below a configured value, offline files treats the share as offline and does not perform cache synchronization.At domain level we can configure slow link policy using group policy object editor. For more information please refer to the post Configure Slow link group policy.

To enable the same at system level or user level there is no direct user interface provision. But we can do this by editing registry key. SlowLinkSpeed registry key is the one which can be edited to control slow link speed behavior for offline files. This registry key corresponds to the group policy “Configure slow link speed” in Computer Configuration -> Administrative Templates -> Network -> Offline files

This registry value is present in the following two nodes.

HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\NetCache
HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\NetCache

Based on whether you want to configure slow link policy for the whole system or for one user you need to use the appropriate registry key from the above. We need to assign the speed level divided by 100 to this DWORD registry value SlowLinkSpeed. For example, to turn to offline mode if the network speed falls below 60 kbps we need to assign 614(60*1024/100) to SlowLinkSpeed registry value. Whenever network speed falls below the configured value, periodic synchronization will not be performed and all the file access requests will be redirected to the local cache. This is like intentionally switching to virtual offline mode even though both the server and the network are up.