Slow network speeds on BCM5700

JofCore · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 08 Jun 2004 Posts: 116

Hello,
I have recently installed Gentoo on a Compaq DL380 server (that was fun

.
This machine has two Broadcom BCM5700 Gigabit ethernet adapters built in.. I have compiled the bcm5700 driver as a module, and have it loading on bootup.
During the initial setup of the machine, everything seemed to be working fine... now that we have moved the machine into its permanent place on the network though, I'm seeing some strange speed issues when sending data.

I first noticed the problem a few days ago when my vnc sessions seemed to take forever to show me the initial screen sometimes. During this time, my ssh terminal into the server would not respond either. I would either kill the vnc window and start over, or just wait an eventually it would work. Once it started working, things generally seemed to run fast.

Today though, I was trying to ftp some fairly large files off the server, and noticed that I was getting incredibly horrible perfomance. I'm talking like .75 - 1.0 KB/s... that just doesn't seem right to me for a 100Mbit network.

At first I thought maybe the firewall that the machine is now sitting behind was causing problems. However, upon further testing, I found that I could FTP files from another server in the same network as this Gentoo box and the speeds were wonderful. It's only when getting things from this machine that things seem slow, so that seems to indicate that the firewall is working good.

I'm kinda stumped as to where to go next to try to figure this out. I love Gentoo running on this machine, but I need to get my network issues resolved, or this server won't be much use to me..

help!!

JofCore · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 08 Jun 2004 Posts: 116

hmm, i have another interesting discovery to add:

If I initiate the transfer from the server itself, and do a put, I get good transfer speeds.

It seems that I only see these bad transfer speeds when I am connecting to the server, rather than having the server initiate the connection. If I do an outgoing put, I get good speeds. If I do an incoming get, I get crappy speeds...

I'm so confused...

JofCore · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 08 Jun 2004 Posts: 116

meh.

anyone?

JofCore · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 08 Jun 2004 Posts: 116

Still experiencing issues with this...

Anyone know what I might check to see what's going on here? I've sort of been able to get around it sometimes... Sometimes I can sftp files from this server to another linux box somewhat quickly (2.5 MB/s), and then I can get then from there.

More on the VNC thing: When I connect to this server via VNC, I do it thru an ssh tunnel. I start my ssh connection from my windoze box via putty, and then connect to VNC using a connection to localhost that is tunneled by ssh. When I first connect to VNC, there is a large delay to show the initial screen, and during this delay, I can't type anything in my PuTTy window either... anything I type is queued up and shows up once the VNC window finally displays the screen, but until it does, the PuTTy ssh window is unresponsive to my input as well...

urk

JofCore · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 08 Jun 2004 Posts: 116

Well, I can safely now say that it appears to be a problem w/the bcm5700 card and/or driver.

I installed a Linksys card that I had laying around that is based on the tulip chipset, recompiled my kernel to have the tulip driver module included and loaded on boot, and now I am getting good FTP throughput.

So, it looks like the bcm5700 just isn't quite ready for linux. Or maybe it's my 2.6 kernel that's screwing it up... I think in the driver dox they only mentioned 2.4 kernels, so...

I'm going to see if I can find some info on Broadcomm's site, maybe they'll know more or be able to offer a newer/fixed driver..

mike4148 · l33t Joined: 09 Sep 2003 Posts: 641

My onboard 5705 works fine right now using the tg3 driver (gentoo-dev-sources-2.6.7-r9); try that one. It has also worked in the past with the bcm5700 driver.

JofCore · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 08 Jun 2004 Posts: 116

My onboard 5705 works fine right now using the tg3 driver

Thanks for the suggestion! When the next kernel update came around, I recompiled w/the tg3 driver as well, and the onboard cards are now working nice and fast!!

thx!

simgrimm · n00b Joined: 16 Apr 2004 Posts: 7

simgrimm · n00b Joined: 16 Apr 2004 Posts: 7

For anyone that may run into a similar problem... In trying to install gentoo on a IBM blade center here is the 2 major problems I ran into:

I needed to do an alternative install (knoppix).
http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/altinstall.xml

And after fighting it for about 20 hours, simply needed to update the firmware on the switch module for the rackcenter to solve the problem above. Now it works great!