From owner-freebsd-questions Mon Jun 17 14:57:06 1996 Return-Path: owner-questions Received: (from root@localhost) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.5/8.7.3) id OAA03276 for questions-outgoing; Mon, 17 Jun 1996 14:57:06 -0700 (PDT) Received: from twwells.com (twwells.com [199.79.159.1]) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.5/8.7.3) with SMTP id OAA03265 for ; Mon, 17 Jun 1996 14:56:59 -0700 (PDT) Received: by twwells.com (Smail3.1.29.1 #8) id m0uVmI3-0001ENC; Mon, 17 Jun 96 17:56 EDT To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org From: bill@twwells.com (T. William Wells) Subject: that slow transfer problem Date: 17 Jun 1996 17:56:53 -0400 Lines: 25 Message-ID: <4q4kb5$675@twwells.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: localhost.twwells.com Sender: owner-questions@freebsd.org X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk Just to let people know: it's been solved. Replacing the old isa card with a shiny new pci card did the trick. It's funny: the first time I was bitten by this particular problem was like over a decade ago. You think I'd have spotted it right away! The problem isn't that the card was so slow that it couldn't transfer at the speeds I expected. Rather, the problem was that the card was mismatched with the network. If all my other cards had been the relatively slow card that I had in my machine, all would have been well. Transfers would have been slow, but not abysmally so. However, the news machine has a nice fast interface. And, it can drive that interface so quickly that it overwhelmed the old, slow interface on ux1. With most operations, that wasn't a problem; there was a relatively slow packet exchange and no overflow problem. But, try to transfer a big batch of data and the interface dropped packets like mad. Between the dropped packets *and* the load from retransmissions, that machine was reduced to moving data through the ethernet like it was a mere serial line. The moral is: keep your ethernet cards in sync. If you stick a fast card in one machine, make sure that all the others are capable of keeping up. Otherwise, you'll find your net looking more like a serial cable than an ethernet cable. :-)