On 03 Aug 2001 23:04:14 -0500, Hall Stevenson wrote: > I was wondering what real-world speeds are of a 100base-t network really > are.
Not more than 7 megabytes per second. That's with high quality switches patch cables and ethernet cards, though (tulip- based cards & CAT 5 wiring & Cisco Catalyst switches). 4 megabytes per second is easy on my home network - I have (mostly) cheap Realtek-8139 ethernet cards & cheap switches. The patch cables are good though :) > I've got (3) machines here at home, connected to one another via a > Linksys router/switch. It uses the switch for the LAN side and it's > rated at 100mb/s (or is it mB/s ??). It's the little b (mb/s). Think bits vs Bytes > All network cards are also rated for 100mb/s. The lights on the switch > indicate that they're connecting at that speed also. Ok > Now, between my machine and my "file server", I just got done > transfering files and saw the speed stabilize at around 15mb/s. 1.5 megabytes per second? That's awfully slow... > I've read that on a 10base-T network, getting 5mb/s is "good", Depends on the ethernet card & the rest of the network. My PowerMacs (also running Debian) all use their on-board 10mbit ethernet & regularly get 8-9mbit regularly. On the other hand the PCI 10mbit cards in some of my PCs have trouble hitting 7mbit but do 5-6mbit pretty regularly. > so I assume 50mb/s is good on my network. It would be ok. I just did a time trial firewall<->file server (both with Realtek 8139 ethernet cards) & I got 40mbit/s. I can more than double that by transferring between my file server & workstation; the workstation has a Linksys v2 ethernet card. *Much* nicer card than the Realteks... > Of course, I'm nowhere near that. > Is there anything I can configure differently ?? Make sure that the switch and the ethernet port on the PC agree what speed & duplex to talk at. Even disagreeing on the duplex can cause the speed problem you see. There are other things as well (rsize & wsize == 8192 when you mount) that can be done to tune NFS performance. > I'm using NFS to share disk space. You shoudln't expect full speed with NFS. There's alot of "adminitrative" overhead involved with each NFS mount. 2.4.x also seems to have some sort of performance problem doing NFS writes... FTP seems to be a pretty good indicator of speed. > My machine has an AMD 450mhz processor and 128mb RAM. The filesystem > is EXT3 and the kernel is 2.4.7. On the "server", it's got a Pentium > 233MMX and 64mb RAM. It's filesystem is ReiserFS. It's running > Mandrake 8 (unsure of kernel -- it's 2.4.x). Neither should make a difference... unless the kernel on the Mandrake system is fairly old. Early releases of 2.4.x had interaction problems between reiserfs & nfs that IIRC led speed degradation. Try again with either 2.4.6 or 2.4.7 on the "server". Phil
