Network Speed [SOLVEDish]

Tun · Last edited by Tun on Thu Aug 12, 2004 6:54 pm; edited 1 time in total

Hi,

Bit of a 'newbie' question but I've played around for a few hours and am getting nowhere fast.

My network file transfer speed over nfs is <1MB/sec which I believe is poor. I'm sure it should be faster than that. Am I right to be expecting faster speeds ?

Both machines are Gentoo, 2.6 kernel. nfs v3 running.

Machine #1 Old 400mhz Dell, Nat Semi 10/100 nic, buffered disk reads 23MB/sec

Machine #2 xp2000+, sis9000 10/100 nic, buffered disk reads 50MB/sec

5 port 10/100 switch connecting the machines, cables between machines can do 100.

I've set the rsize=8192 and wsize=8192 on the client.

What am I missing ? Any ideas what I should be trying next ? Kernel patches to allow bigger than 8192 r/wsize ? NFS over TCP to allow this size increase ?

(scp transfers at roughly 2.6MB a second)

Thanks in advance

Hrk · Posted: Wed Aug 11, 2004 9:06 pm Post subject:

Please, do not misunderstand me, but can you check if the network is really going at 100Mbs? Should it go at 10Mbs, 1MB/s of traffic would be appropriate.

If I do a

Tun · Posted: Wed Aug 11, 2004 10:10 pm Post subject:

Thanks for replying. I've not misunderstood, your English is good.

Machine #1 (eth0 is my ISP)

devon · l33t Joined: 23 Jun 2003 Posts: 943

You may want to trying running ttcp or iperf between the Gentoo boxes to test the network speeds with the overhead of NFS.

Gherald2 · Posted: Thu Aug 12, 2004 2:28 am Post subject:

I've allwyas used netperf (emerge netperf). You just run "netperf -H hostname" and it gives you a throughput in bits/s

What are ttcp and iperf like? Any different?
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devon · l33t Joined: 23 Jun 2003 Posts: 943

Gherald2 · Posted: Thu Aug 12, 2004 4:17 am Post subject:

No you aren't mistaken, sorry for neglecting to mention. You need to emerge (or apt-get from non-free) on both the client and server, and then /etc/init.d/netperf on the server and perhaps rc-update if you like it.
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Hrk · Posted: Thu Aug 12, 2004 7:47 am Post subject:

Hrk · Posted: Thu Aug 12, 2004 8:08 am Post subject:

I have a question relating to netperf. I have installed it and run it on my two machines. The results aren't bad at all, but there's something which puzzles me.

aiace = XP1800+, 512MB, Maxtor 40GB UDMA6 (on VIA VT233A controller)
ulisse = Pentium 200 MMX, 98MB, Seagate 60GB uDMA5 (on Promise FastTrack PCI controller)

Tun · Posted: Thu Aug 12, 2004 8:51 am Post subject:

Thanks for the extra suggestions. Am at work now, so will be able to try in 6 hours or so when I get to go home. Will let you know how it goes.

Tun · Posted: Thu Aug 12, 2004 4:54 pm Post subject:

Getting closer. Looks like my network setup is okay. I've run the performance tests and am getting close on 100Mb/sec throughput in both directions over both tcp and udp. Results at the bottom if anybody is interested.

This has made me look at more closely at nfs (possibly portmap). /var/log/messages and dmesg both give me

Hrk · Posted: Thu Aug 12, 2004 5:47 pm Post subject:

Hmm... I'm wondering something. How much nfsd processes do you have running at the same time? If I remember correctly, when I decrased their number, I got smaller transfer rates.

Anarcho · Advocate Joined: 06 Jun 2004 Posts: 2970 Location: Germany

I'm also sad about poor nfs performance.

I have a Gigabit Network running but nfs only runs with abput 8 - 10 MB/s
but when I copy with ftp, I get ~23 MB/s.

My iperf:

Tun · Posted: Thu Aug 12, 2004 6:54 pm Post subject:

BINGO

Just added tcp support to the kernel, added tcp to the fstab line and I'm getting 8Mb/sec !!

I feel like I'm cheating and should try and get it working with UDP but I've spend enough time on this. I'm just happy that I've finally got it running at a decent speed.

Hrk · Posted: Thu Aug 12, 2004 7:24 pm Post subject:

r4v5 · n00b Joined: 11 Sep 2004 Posts: 5

"negotiated link" stuff doesn't mean that it's dropping it to 10. Rather, some devices do not support full duplex (transmitting and receiving at the same time); these can only transfer a combined total of 100Mbit/sec (or something like that). Tx and Rx are shared. Full duplex, however, allows a device to send and receive at the same time, so you can transfer to the device at 100 and from the device at 100 at the same time. (all performance claims maximum, not typical. ymmv. the poster takes no responsibility, period.)
Now, if a half-duplex device talks to a full-duplex device, it gets confused and lost. Therefore, full duplex is only used when both sides agree. That's the negotiation stuff.

...i think. I might be wrong.

I had the same issue with NFS, moving at around 300k/sec. I do not know what caused it, as the same hardware running Slack was easily able to communicate with the same box that was nfs receiving at much higher speeds. So i waited it out and vowed to use scp next time.