Network Speed

thompsonmike · Posted: Thu Apr 07, 2005 3:57 pm Post subject: Network Speed

I have a little problem with my network. It is laid out like this

Internet Modem (ADSL)
|
|
Gentoo Router
|
|
Network Switch
|
|
Gentoo Desktop x 2 / Wireless Access Point / Webcam

Now the whole system only runs at 10Mb/s tops. I would expect it to run at 50 - 60 Mbs.

All the network cards in use are reporting Full Duplex, 100Mbs apart from the one going to the ADSL modem, which is reporting Half Duplex 100Mb/s. Could this be a dodgy cable, Network Card? It is a mix of Netgear PCI cards and Cisco cards.

I have disconnected the WAP, and network cards, but the speed is still 10Mb/s

Any ideas on how I could up the speed a little? All the systems have DMA on their Hard Drives.

NFS Seems to be a little more zippy, but toward the end of the transfer it tails off to around 700Kb/s.

Please Please has any one got any ideas?
_________________
Thanks

Michael..

mens · Guru Joined: 27 Aug 2003 Posts: 392 Location: Belgium

Make a crosslink cable and check the connection between the different devices 2x2 to detect the faulty one. Are you sure the switch is not the problem? Is it a real switch or a switching hub?
Have you sniffed your network to see if there is no unexpected bandwidth being used?

thompsonmike · Posted: Thu Apr 07, 2005 4:25 pm Post subject:

thompsonmike · Posted: Thu Apr 07, 2005 7:30 pm Post subject:

mens · Guru Joined: 27 Aug 2003 Posts: 392 Location: Belgium

Twisted Pair means an RJ45 port.
What transceiver are you using on the other cards which use MII?

thompsonmike · Posted: Thu Apr 07, 2005 8:09 pm Post subject:

transceiver? I am unsure as to what you mean by this.

That card is a NVidia built in jobbie on the Motherboard. I am using the reversed Enginerred driver in a 2.6.11-r4 Gentoo Kernel.

I was using a 3COM in this machine, but the new kernel had a right fit when I scrapped Windows and moved Linux only, complained about "Invalid MAC Address in EEPROM" and refused to even look at the card.
_________________
Thanks

Michael..

mens · Guru Joined: 27 Aug 2003 Posts: 392 Location: Belgium

According to your 2nd ethtool output, you are using the MII interface on your card which has an external transceiver. What card is that? fyi, a transceiver is a device to link two different network type. (like BNC to TP).

thompsonmike · Posted: Thu Apr 07, 2005 10:13 pm Post subject:

thompsonmike · Posted: Fri Apr 08, 2005 11:34 am Post subject:

Just changed that the Network card in the client for a NetGear, and still getting the same results. All transfers no matter what are going out at 10Mb/s

_________________
Thanks

Michael..

thompsonmike · Posted: Fri Apr 08, 2005 12:05 pm Post subject:

I now dont belive this is a network problem, I read in another thread that reiserfs is dodgy on some things, so I did a SCP transfer to another host on the network and got 18Mb/s. I tried then to SCP it to 127.0.0.1 and got the same speed.

Looks like it may be a local issue, not on related to the network!

MrUlterior · Guru Joined: 22 Mar 2005 Posts: 511 Location: Switzerland

Emerge iperf to test your network speed. and post the results
_________________

Misanthropy 2.0 - enough hate to go around

thompsonmike · Posted: Fri Apr 08, 2005 12:31 pm Post subject:

Thats just odd.

On the server

root@polaris mike # iperf -s
------------------------------------------------------------
Server listening on TCP port 5001
TCP window size: 85.3 KByte (default)
------------------------------------------------------------
[ 4] local 192.168.1.1 port 5001 connected with 192.168.1.14 port 34837
[ 4] 0.0-10.0 sec 111 MBytes 92.8 Mbits/sec

On the Client

mike@pherkab mike $ iperf -c 192.168.1.1
------------------------------------------------------------
Client connecting to 192.168.1.1, TCP port 5001
TCP window size: 16.0 KByte (default)
------------------------------------------------------------
[ 3] local 192.168.1.14 port 34837 connected with 192.168.1.1 port 5001
[ 3] 0.0-10.0 sec 111 MBytes 92.8 Mbits/sec

Everything else reports under 10Mb/s. Can any one explain why??

That transfer was done through a SMB share.
_________________
Thanks

Michael..

MrUlterior · Guru Joined: 22 Mar 2005 Posts: 511 Location: Switzerland

MrUlterior · Guru Joined: 22 Mar 2005 Posts: 511 Location: Switzerland

Two other possible factors which will contribute towards bad copy performance is your hdd & filesystem. Test both sides with hdparm.
_________________

Misanthropy 2.0 - enough hate to go around

Shazam · Posted: Sat Apr 16, 2005 4:26 pm Post subject:

not to make matters worse, but isn't it a 100 Mbit card and you are taking of Mbytes being transfered ? that's a difference by a factor of eight. 100Mbits / 8 = 12.2 Mbytes. So you should be already pretty happy w/ your 10 Mbyte/s if that's the case, most of the rest probably falls for the overhead.

thompsonmike · Posted: Sat Apr 16, 2005 8:42 pm Post subject:

WarMachine · Apprentice Joined: 15 Jul 2002 Posts: 181

I thought it was a 10 to 1 factor when considering network activity?

Shazam · Posted: Sun Apr 17, 2005 10:53 pm Post subject:

well the ten to one factor can be consider that way, because you usally lose lots of bandwith to overhead. but the theoratic transformation comes from the bytes and bits. that one byte contains 8 bits ...