so I've embarked on a massive setup, but run into a roadblock very quickly. 

I've got 8 machines total, on a TP link Archer good cat6 cables, all 1gb ethernet ports

wifi disabled on all machines
firewall disabled on all machines

real time virus defender disabled on all machines

so far on reaper I've had very poor luck actually using all machines. I can use each machine independantly, sometimes a few together... but a few different machines at the same time and it becomes unplayable both on record armed as well as playback. 

i.e. harp from one machine, violin legato on 1 machine, then legato on 2 different woodwinds. Infact at first I thought I was having problems specifically with the woodwinds so first I tried using latency mon and just trying to optimize everything but then it still didn't help, I would get massive stutters, drop outs, stuck notes - so I reformatted that machine. Started to build a template back up on the woodwind machine and all seemed well, had 4 midi busses armed shredding away on runs legato patches

then I added the other machines and same thing on a completely new project, with nothing other than vepro instances. 

it's actually insane that I can't get this to work well, all the machines are easily 2-4 times as powerful as my old machine and it's struggling despite every single metric having plenty of headroom. CPU on main machine is not struggling, none of the CPUs/disks/network/ram are even close to be struggling. so is there some magical network adapter settings I need? 

7 of the machines are all the same r9 5950x 16c/32t with 64-128gb of ram on m.2's 

one machine is older, i7 5960x 128gb ram(which has barely be utilized because I'm not able to get the 6 other machines to play nicely enough yet. 

all machines have fresh windows home, bare min' installed on them.