Date: Wed, 01 May 1996 15:28:16 +0100 From: Colman Reilly <careilly@ios.internet-ireland.ie> To: hackers@freebsd.org Subject: Really slow network transfer rates. Message-ID: <199605011428.PAA29674@ios.internet-ireland.ie>
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Problem: I am suffering from ethernet tranfer rates of 6.5kps between machines on the same ethernet. There are 5 FreeBSD boxes involved. Win95 boxes on the same network get normal transfer rates between themselves but slow to the UNIX boxes. Ping times to all the machines are fine, telnet performance is fine. Any sustained transfer slows down to 6.5kps. Now for the weird bit: when I dial in to my annex, I can get sustained transfer rates of 30kps down the modem, but when I go directly over the ethernet I get only 6.5k. This I do not understand at all. And yes, both rates *are* as reported by the same program. So far I have examined the following possible causes of the problem: 1) Interupt conflicts. dmesg shows no conflicts, and looking at the BIOS and jumpers on the various cards shows no conflicts. 2) Bad drivers for some devices. The systems have no common hardware at this stage. They have different motherboards, CPUs, ethernet cards, SCSI controllers, PCI chipsets, and so on. I can't think of any shared hardware except for 1GB Seagate Medalist SCSI hard drives. They were all running on 3Com 590's but I have since tried both ISA and PCI based ed1 cards. 3) The network itself. No unusual statistics I can see: almost no collisions, a few lot packets, but way under 1%, a few unknown protocols (network doom I imagine!). Transfer rates between Windows boxes are fine. 4) Shortage of resources: the machines in question all have at least 24MB of memory, lot's of disk and fast CPUs, mostly P120. 5) Different versions of the OS. I have both 2.1.0 and 2.2-SNAP running, with the same results. I have a 2.1.0R cofiguration elsewhere that works fine. The setups are more or less out of the box, simply changing /etc/sysconfig as instructed, so I don't think I can possibly have set a configuration parameter incorrectly. My 486/25 with 8MB, no PCI and IDE gives me far faster transfer rates. The network is a mix of UTP and thinwire, and it doesn't matter which the machines are connected to. Any ideas? This is rapidly driving me mad. Thanks, Colman
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