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Date:      Sat, 5 Dec 1998 00:57:14 -0600 (CST)
From:      Kyle Mestery <mestery@winternet.com>
To:        David Greenman <dg@root.com>
Cc:        Bill Paul <wpaul@skynet.ctr.columbia.edu>, hardware@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: Call for testers for RealTek 8139 driver 
Message-ID:  <Pine.GSO.4.05.9812050047230.17859-100000@tundra.winternet.com>
In-Reply-To: <199811302310.PAA21333@root.com>

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Hi,

On Mon, 30 Nov 1998, David Greenman wrote:

> >I am seeing something weird.  When transfering large files, I can routinely get
> >about 1000 KB/s between the two FreeBSD boxes.  But, the collision light on my
> >hub flashes a lot, which surprised me, since the only traffic on the hub was
> >between the two FreeBSD boxes.  So, I did a netstat -i on both boxes, and
> 
>    Don't worry about that. Slight differences in the speed of the NICs on the
> wire (specifically, their ability to send out back-to-back packets) is the
> main thing that will affect collisions. The collisions are caused by the
> output packets colliding with the TCP ACKs and is quite normal and expected
> with half duplex ethernet.
> 
I have had some more time to look into this.  I still see collisions when I
am displaying Quake back across the wire.  Lots of collisions.  But the other
thing that bothers me is the performance of these cards.  I know they are
incredibly low-end (for $20, I didn't expect an Intel Etherexpress Pro100/B!),
and I have read the driver if_rl.c to see Bill Paul's comments about the
chip, but I am seeing pretty terrible performance from my cards.  Both cards
are id'd as follows:

rl0: <RealTek 8139 10/100BaseTX> rev 0x10 int a irq 19 on pci0.15.0
rl0: Ethernet address: 00:e0:7d:01:a5:05
rl0: autoneg complete, link status good (half-duplex, 100Mbps)

rl0: <RealTek 8139 10/100BaseTX> rev 0x10 int a irq 19 on pci0.17.0
rl0: Ethernet address: 00:e0:7d:01:a5:07
rl0: autoneg complete, link status good (half-duplex, 100Mbps)

The first card is on my dual PPro200 with 128MB RAM, aic7880, all SCSI.
The second on is on my dual Pentium 133, 2GB EIDE, 1 GB SCSI on a BT-946c.
Both are on a Hawking 10/100 dual speed hub with 10ft cat5 cable connecting
them tothe hub.  There is also a HP/Apollo running NetBSD on the hub operating
at 10Mb/s.  The Realtek cards are running at 100Mb/s half-duplex.

When I use ftp to transfer a file of size 9.5MB, if I am on the PPro machine,
and type `put file`, I get about 1.5MB/s-2.5MB/s, and no collisions on either
machine.  But, if I type `get file` from the PPro, I get between 4.5-5.5MB/s,
and see about 340 collisions on each machine.  Is this to be expected because
the Pentium is that much slower than the PPro machine with this driver?
Is anyone else seeing this type of performance?  I remember Bill Paul saying
he was seeing 11MB/s with a PII400.  How does it scale to what I have is
what I am wondering, and if the performance I am seeing is to be expected.

--
Kyle Mestery
StorageTek's Storage Networking Group



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