From owner-freebsd-stable@FreeBSD.ORG Wed Nov 29 07:49:59 2006 Return-Path: X-Original-To: freebsd-stable@freebsd.org Delivered-To: freebsd-stable@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.FreeBSD.org (mx1.freebsd.org [69.147.83.52]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id E411A16A40F for ; Wed, 29 Nov 2006 07:49:59 +0000 (UTC) (envelope-from spork@bway.net) Received: from xena.bway.net (xena.bway.net [216.220.96.26]) by mx1.FreeBSD.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id D990A43CAB for ; Wed, 29 Nov 2006 07:49:58 +0000 (GMT) (envelope-from spork@bway.net) Received: (qmail 70969 invoked by uid 0); 29 Nov 2006 03:49:58 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO white.nat.fasttrackmonkey.com) (spork@bway.net@216.220.116.154) by smtp.bway.net with (DHE-RSA-AES256-SHA encrypted) SMTP; 29 Nov 2006 03:49:58 -0000 Date: Tue, 28 Nov 2006 22:50:17 -0500 (EST) From: Charles Sprickman X-X-Sender: spork@white.nat.fasttrackmonkey.com To: freebsd-stable@freebsd.org Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII; format=flowed Subject: vr speed issues X-BeenThere: freebsd-stable@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.5 Precedence: list List-Id: Production branch of FreeBSD source code List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Wed, 29 Nov 2006 07:50:00 -0000 Hi all, I spent some time trying to track down slow tcp performance on a small office switched 100 LAN. We just put in a number of whitebox PCs running FreeBSD 6.1-p2/PC-BSD 1.2 that all have onboard Via Rhine 10/100 ethernet controllers. Performace with scp was around 200KB/s, ftp wavered between 300-500KB/s. This did not appear to be a duplex mismatch - unmanaged switch showed them all at 100/Full, put some other hosts on the same ports/cabling and got near wire speed. I took the cabling out of the equation, the switch, no improvement. The only thing that got me decent performance was putting two hosts back to back with an xover cable. I eventually realized that the only hosts with any speed issues in the office were these boxes with the Via ethernet. Putting an equally cheap DLink (RealTek/rl) in one of them gave me much better performance. At another site, I was dealing with a new intranet server running FreeBSD 6.2-PRE (11/16) on a decent Asus board. This also has an onboard Via Rhine ethernet controller. While pulling some files over from the box it was replacing, I noticed that I was getting only a few hundred KB/s on this box. Before putting it into production, I grabbed a cheap Intel 10/100 card and put that in. Problem solved. So it seems to me like perhaps there's an issue with the vr driver. I noticed it does have some quirks mentioned in the manpage, and I don't see too many changes to the driver in the last year or so. Is there any information I can supply to help debug this? I've got a bunch of these machines around. I can get a tcpdump from both ends during an ftp transfer, and the boxes are mine to toy with after hours. I've posted a dmesg from both boxes (PC-BSD and 6.2-PRE): http://www.bway.net/~spork/6.1p2-dmesg.txt http://www.bway.net/~spork/6.2-dmesg.txt Thanks, Charles ___ Charles Sprickman NetEng/SysAdmin Bway.net - New York's Best Internet - www.bway.net spork@bway.net - 212.655.9344