[geeks] Network Slowness

[Sridhar Ayengar]

Patrick Giagnocavo wrote:
>> 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.

I looked, but I didn't see it there.  Do you have a more specific place 
I could look?

>> 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 .

Yup.

>> 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.

I believe I have it set for autonegotiation, and I believe it 
autonegotiated 100Mbps full-duplex right out of the box.

>> 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?

No.  It's one of the cheapies which can only be accessed through a web 
interface.

> 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.)

I'll check tonight.

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

OpenSSH SFTP using Blowfish ciphers.

Peace...  Sridhar