[geeks] Network Slowness

[Patrick Giagnocavo]

On May 24, 2007, at 2:38 AM, Sridhar Ayengar wrote:

> I have these three machines.  They are configured as follows:
>
> 1. IBM Thinkpad T60p
> 2.16GHz Core Duo
> Intel PRO/1000PL Built-In gigabit ethernet
> Windows XP Pro SP2
>

Probably has the QOS scheduler turned on (visible under the properties 
of the NIC).  Might want to research whether that has an effect on 
anything.

> 2. Supermicro P6SBU
> 550MHz Pentium III
> 512MB ECC RAM
> NetBSD/i386 3.0.1
>
Assuming you are checking everything with netstat -rn and ifconfig -a .

> 3. Home-grown PC with Cheap Taiwanese Motherboard (Biostar, maybe?)
> Athlon64 X2 3800+ (2GHz dual core)
> nVidia nForce built-in gigabit ethernet
> 400GB 7200RPM SATA drive
> 2GB RAM
> NetBSD/amd64 3.1
>
> Connecting these three machines together is an 8-port HP Procurve
> gigabit switch.  The only other thing attached to the switch is a Cisco
> 7505 router routing across the WAN connection, and its interface to the
> switch is a PA-FE-TX.  None of the machines have jumbo frames turned 
> on.
>   The Intel gigabit card in the Pentium III has hardware fragmentation
> and checksumming turned on.
>
on the PA-FE-TX, are you doing autonegotiation or did you explicitly 
set the speed and duplex on the FastEthernet interface.

> The problem is no matter where I am transferring data from or to,  I
> only get about 5.5MB/sec.  That seems kinda slow to me.  Any ideas?
>
> I would have thought it would go much faster than this on gigabit
> ethernet.  I get better speeds than this on FDDI.
>

Does the Procurve have a console you can connect to?

Check that it isn't doing anything weird (check autonego, whether it 
has its own IP address, whether you can configure ethernet frame 
settings or what method it uses for handling packets like 
store/forward, cut-through etc.)

What protocol are you using for transfers?  SSH? FTP?

--Patrick