Topic: Performance of Gigabit Card

[bluepolo]

Hi. I have SME 6.5RC1 on Athlon 1200 with Intel Pro / 1000T. Maybe this is a newbie question, but network performance is not so good.

I can't get anything better than about 10% network capacity to the SME box, but from the same client (WinXP) I get cose to 20% to my XServe.

The drive is Ultra ATA66 with correct cable.

In WinXp Task Manager Network tab the graph flatlines. So I'm hitting a non-physical network limit of some kind ie not cable / switch / card? Possibly driver?

Is there anything to check / try etc?

TIA

BP

[bluepolo]

very sad, but just replying to my own post, to 'bump' it up in case anyone has any ideas.

thanks!

[Reinhold]

bluepolo,

...perhaps if you would specific a bit more WHAT you did and measured ?
(Like what is 10% network capacity ???)

In general use a simple protocol to measure throughput in Megabyte/second ...
Proposal:
Use your XP workstation to up- and download several files (CDROM size) to and from your SME server with FTP and SAMBA protocols.
Give us filesize and time, both network card models, the switch model and specifics on other hardware relevant.

Note: 100Mbit isn't 10x 10Mbit ... (generally far from it!)


Regards
Reinhold

[jmvelez]

a few weeks ago I prepared a server with 1.6TB.  I try version 6 with DMays rpm for intel, 6.5rc1 and 7.  version 6 was faster.  I try 6.5rc1 with DMays rpm but did not work.  My test was using a program called drive snapshot (backup windows servers and workstatios). version 6 was 33% faster than 6.5rc1 and very close on version 7.  The realtek gigabit driver does not work well with 6.0 or 6.5rc1.

[bluepolo]

Thanks for the answers.

My tests were, perhaphs a little unscientific.

basically I have 3 different types of computer:

AthlonXP2500 / NForce 2 1Gb RAM running WinXP/SP1
Apple G4 server / 800 / 1Gb RAM running OSX Server 10.3.9
Athlon 1200 / KT Something / 256Mb RAM running SME 6.5RC1

The network is gigabit, I have fully wired leads etc, and the drives in each machine are comparable.

If I copy a moderately large file (eg 500Mb) between the winxp ox and the mac the XP network utilisation goes to about 25% and the file takes time X to copy. I get similar time either push or pull.

If I do the same with the same file between the XP box and the SME box the network utilisation flat lines at 10% and the transfer takes time X x 2 ie about double the time.

The SME box has more CPU than the Mac, so that can't be a factor, all the machines have gigabit, so thats OK, and the HDs are similar.

As I'm transferring a file that is too big to be cached, the only thing I can think is different is that the drivers for the Intel gigabit card are limited in some way?

Anyway I'm going to try CentOS 4 and see what happens

BP