Date: Sun, 30 Dec 2001 00:55:39 -0800 From: "Leo L. Schwab" <ewhac@best.com> To: freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Slow-Start Networking Message-ID: <20011230005539.A26777@best.com>
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I'm experiencing difficulty with my networking under FreeBSD 4.3. Briefly, the networking is dead slow until it's had time to "warm up". I have FreeBSD 4.3 installed on an Intel 810-based MB with a RealTek 8139 Ethernet controller. (There is also a 3C905-TX in the machine, but it is unused and unconfigured at the moment.) After cold-boot and logging in, there is an extremely high incidence of dropped packets. 'ping's to well-known hosts, including physically adjacent machines, show 50% packet loss or higher. TCP connections stall out; 'netstat' shows unsent bytes remaining in the Send-Q. Now, sit and wait a bit (three or four minutes), and test again. All pings get through, and TCP connections no longer stall out. During "slow" operation, the network activity lights suggest that the interface is attempting to send and receive packets, but the system isn't seeing them. Nothing in /var/log/* shows anything unusual. Some searching through the freebsd-questions archive revealed that I should set the media type with 'ifconfig'. I did that, selecting 10baseT/UTP. While this improved the situation (the time I need to wait has been greatly reduced), the problem sitll persists. This is especially irritating for SSH sessions and the Zope server I'm trying to set up. (Funny though, 'autoselect' seemed to work just fine before under FreeBSD 4.2.) I did compile a custom kernel. I've done it before for 4.2, and I'm fairly sure I didn't botch it :-). My config file is available upon request. I have not yet tried reinstalling the GENERIC kernel to see if the problem goes away. The only other thing I can think of is that my FlowPoint DSL router (which doubles as my LAN hub) is doing something wonky with packets from the FreeBSD machine. I'm not using NAT or DHCP. All suggestions appreciated. Schwab To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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