Date: Wed, 9 Oct 1996 15:22:18 -0700 From: Jim Shankland <jas@flyingfox.COM> To: John.McLaughlin@acucobol.ie, rgrimes@gndrsh.aac.dev.com Cc: hardware@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Poor SMC Etherpower 10/100 transfer rates Message-ID: <199610092222.PAA26723@saguaro.flyingfox.com>
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Rod Grimes <rgrimes@gndrsh.aac.dev.com> writes: > I have come accross something similiar in the very early days of > the SMC9332DST. It turned out to be one of the cards was bad in > 10MB/s mode. Note that this bad card drug the whole network > down to <500kb/s until I found it and eliminated it. > > The lesson learned from this was that just swapping cards does > not always tell you that the cards are okay, it maybe one bad > card dragging the setup down :-(. > > The defective card in my case was not listening to the wire > before starting to transmit, this caused excess collisions on > the network and everyone suffered. Even very light traffic from > this node would cause serious problems for all other nodes, a > simple ``ping hostname'' would drive my network peformance down > the tubes :-( By the most amazing coincidence (seriously), I just returned from a visit to a client, where I was trying to debug some network problems. They have about 6 hosts on an Ethernet, but 3 of them are responsible for virtually all the traffic: a FreeBSD box with the SMC9332DST in 10 Mbit mode, and 2 WindowsNT machines with Intel Ethermumble cards. Total traffic on the Ethernet was running about 2 Megabytes per minute (i.e., ballpark 3% of the theoretical maximum capacity); the FreeBSD box is reporting a 20%+ collision rate! I will now definitely try swapping out the SMC card. Just another data point .... Jim Shankland Flying Fox Computer Systems, Inc.
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