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To: hackers@freebsd.org
Subject: Really slow network transfer rates.
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Date: Wed, 01 May 1996 15:28:16 +0100
From: Colman Reilly <careilly@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