Slow HTTP transfer speeds

[Geese]

Let me preface this by saying that I've spent 20+ hours attempting to solve this before bringing it here.

I have a machine running Gentoo 1.4 with the 2.4.20-gaming-r3 kernel built from stage3.

While building the box, I was acheiving very high download speeds of ebuilds. In the last few days, I've noticed that http download speeds are downright awful. I thought, hmm, maybe it's just the cable modem again... So I pop open my winxp laptop and do a speed test. ~2Mbps down. Attempt the speed test on the Gentoo box and it stalls before loading the page.

So, I go back to basics. Change out the cable. Same issues. Force 100 Full to the NIC and the switch agrees. Same issues. 10-half, same issues.

I'm wondering if this is only http connections. So I set up a file share on my laptop and have the gentoo box download via SMB a 130MB file. "time cp hl1110.exe /win" and the 86 MB file downloads in 15 seconds. That's about 6MB/s. This is across a 5port 10/100 switch locally.

So, it is just http connections. Maybe Mozilla 1.4 just sucks. So I pull out wget 1.8.2 and attempt to pull a 300KB image from my webserver at the exact same time as the winxp laptop uses IE6. The XP laptop has it down in 2 seconds. The wget starts out at 10KB/s and trickles down to less than 1KB/s before getting 10% of the file. It then stalls.

Frustrated, I decided to stop using eepro100.o and try e100.o. EXACT same issues.

F&ck it! I'll boot into windows 2000 on the Gentoo box (dual boot) and see if it's the hardware. GOD F&CKING DAMMIT! The dslreports speed tests run flawlessly and clock over 2Mbps. Browsing is speedy, etc.

So, I took my spare 3c905b-tx and popped it in there. Disabled the onboard intel nic in the BIOS, rebooted, rebuilt the kernel modules, installed them. Added the 3c95x to the /etc/modules.autoload.d/kernel-2.4 file, and rebooted. The NIC came up just fine.

wget http://www.same.com/image/as/before.jpg

And it stalled JUST LIKE THE OTHER card!

I used the same cable when I tried the wget and the SMB connection. I pulled 6MB/s from my little laptop via SMB. I then pulled less than 1KB/s for 5 seconds when trying to download an 300KB image before it "stalled" and stopped downloading via wget. The same cable was used when booting into win2k.

This box is so bare bones, it's silly. No iptables, etc.

I'm so sick right now. I was loving my Gentoo box for the last week or so, and now it's giving me fits.

I've narrowed it down to the kernel or software, not the cable, the switch, the net connection, the driver, or all programs.

Please offer any suggestions. I am willing to try anything. I built this box over an entire week getting three monitors, all three quake games, and sound stuff working. Right now, anything that would take less than 24 hours work (to rebuild the box from scratch) would still save me time.

[Geese]

By the way, Mozilla 1.4 doesn't suck. I said, "maybe"

[int2str]

I would try:

[vm666]

[Geese]

Guess what...

After all that effort (I did set my mtu to 1425 earlier but no dice), I noticed that my roommate's linksys router was using a newer firmware than before. I asked him if he upgraded it and he said he did it 2 days ago. So I looked into the firmware notes and it noted three things, the last of which was interesting "Fixed fragmented packets arriving out of order".

So I rolled back to the previous firmware, and everything came back to normal. Speedtests from mozilla were over 2Mbps, etc.

I was never a fan of Linksys, and now I downright dispise them. "Fixed" my ass. The window's boxes worked while it made Linux boxes chugg. Boy, that infuriated me.

I'm over it now. It's time to get a real firewall in there