100 Mbps network not near 100 Mbps

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May 7th, 2002, 03:55 PM
AKautz

100 Mbps network not near 100 Mbps

I have two PCs (one XP and one NT) with Linksys 10/100 Eatherfast cards set to run at 100 Mbps, connected with a SMG 10/100 router, using CAT 5, and running file and print sharing over NetBEUI (for the XP PC I had to retrieve NetBEUI from the XP disc). When the computers are basically idle, I cannot achieve over 34 Mbps when transferring a file. In about the fatest test run, a 220 MB zip file took about 65 seconds to transfer.

I even tried bypassing the router with a crossover cable, which resulted in near identical results.

When I called Linksys, the person said they don't provide support for peer to peer networks.

Thanks for any help,
Adam
May 7th, 2002, 04:32 PM
Fierce

Check your cabling for kinks, sharp bends (near 90 degree) or any nearby interference (i.e. power cords, flourescent lights, etc.) and check the ends where the cable terminates in the RJ-45 connector. Also inspect the network cards and router ports for any possible wear and tear or damage. Don't extend the cables any longer than 290ft (realistically 300 ft, but I factor in a tolerance). Also check the drivers on the netcards and router. Hope this helps.
May 8th, 2002, 08:36 AM
Ahcoraj

If I'm not mistaken, some of your confusion may come from the bits/bytes issue. Ethernet is measured in megabits of information, and windows organizes things in bytes (8 bits) Doing the math, that would mean your transfer of that file averaged about 27.1 megabits per second. You can use bandwidth monitors to check the speed of your network, and i can tell you that my 5 node switched/routed network at home gives similar transfer rates. I've never botherd to ask why though, the average would be so far below the theoretical maximum. I realize there are overhead and latency issues, but can honeslty say i've never seen more than say 60% of the 100mbps speed anywhere.
May 8th, 2002, 09:24 AM
silencio

You also have to add header information to each packet. I'm too lazy to look up size but you've got another header on each layer of the iso.
May 8th, 2002, 06:11 PM
+Daemon+

Configure the NIC cards to use Full 100 base Duplex

Make usre its not on Hardware Defualt or Auto Select

Also try uninstalling the tcp/ip protocol then reinstalling it
May 8th, 2002, 08:15 PM
Matridom

<blockquote>quote:<hr />Originally posted by AKautz:
I have two PCs (one XP and one NT) with Linksys 10/100 Eatherfast cards set to run at 100 Mbps, connected with a SMG 10/100 router, using CAT 5, and running file and print sharing over NetBEUI (for the XP PC I had to retrieve NetBEUI from the XP disc). When the computers are basically idle, I cannot achieve over 34 Mbps when transferring a file. In about the fatest test run, a 220 MB zip file took about 65 seconds to transfer.

I even tried bypassing the router with a crossover cable, which resulted in near identical results.

When I called Linksys, the person said they don't provide support for peer to peer networks.

Thanks for any help,
Adam<hr /></blockquote>I have a very simple explanation for the issue. It's a bottleneck on the hard drive transfer speed. your sending your file at 34 mbps/sec, would that not be the transfer speed of the average IDE drive?

The MEDIA can take the 100mbps, but your just not able to put the info on it that quickly because of the slower hard disk.
May 9th, 2002, 03:47 AM
Outcoded

<blockquote>quote:<hr />Originally posted by Fierce:
Check your cabling for kinks, sharp bends (near 90 degree) or any nearby interference (i.e. power cords, flourescent lights, etc.) and check the ends where the cable terminates in the RJ-45 connector. Also inspect the network cards and router ports for any possible wear and tear or damage. Don't extend the cables any longer than 290ft (realistically 300 ft, but I factor in a tolerance). Also check the drivers on the netcards and router. Hope this helps.<hr /></blockquote>All that makes me amazed my home LAN actually works :rolleyes:
May 9th, 2002, 06:52 AM
Feet

Also, you got bus mastering NICs or standard ones?

If the former, you can write direct to memory, otherwise you can be restricted by whatever else the CPUs on the machines are doing, this will slow it down, especially with lots of small files.

Also, did you test it with lots of small files, or one big file? One big file is better, preferably something binary, like an ISO.
May 9th, 2002, 07:00 AM
Feet

ps. My network with Two D-link 520TX+ (bus mastering) and a Netgear RP114 router often peaks at 50ish MB/s (theoretical max is 87.5MB/s including tx of extra info)
May 9th, 2002, 10:52 AM
Deity

<blockquote>quote:<hr />Originally posted by Matridom:
I have a very simple explanation for the issue. It's a bottleneck on the hard drive transfer speed. your sending your file at 34 mbps/sec, would that not be the transfer speed of the average IDE drive?

The MEDIA can take the 100mbps, but your just not able to put the info on it that quickly because of the slower hard disk.<hr /></blockquote>Agreed.
May 9th, 2002, 04:38 PM
AKautz

Thanks for all the comments and suggestions. In response,

Fierce,
While I did notice two nice kinks in the 100' Cat 5, it does not appear to have affected data transmission speed, because it performed nearly identical to a 25 ft. crossover cable. As far as wear and tear goes, both NICs are less than two years in use and in my opinion have been treated delicately. In regards to the drivers, the one on my XP machine has a newer date (a few months newer) than the one listed on the web site. In fact, after downloading the zipped driver file from Linksys.com, I don't see any driver specifically for Windows XP listed. The closest match I see is a Win 2k driver, so I think I will stick with what I have.

Ahcoraj,
At this point, I'd be satisfied with 60% of 100 Mbps, as it would be about twice as fast as I am running now.

iateyourcat,
I don't think header info could account for the majority of the lack of speed I am experienncing.

AM Daemon,
Cards are set to use only 100Base TX Full Duplex. Also, how could reinstalling TCP/IP help, since I am transferring using NetBEUI?

Matridom,
Nice suggestion. Using two hard disks in the XP machine, transferring the file from one hard disk to the hard disk that was used in the previous trials resulted in a transfer speed of approximately 5.37 Mb per second, more than a 50% improvement. Never the less, I was kind of surprised at the results; I thought the IDE bus was faster than that. It makes me wonder, what type of system would one have to own in order to make any use of a gigabit NIC?

Feet,
The Linsys Etherfast 10/100 NIC does support bus mastering. However, even if it did not support bus mastering, if the CPU was relatively idle, would bus mastering make that much of a performance difference? BTW, I tested the transfer with one 220 MB ZIP file.

Thanks for all the thought provoking feedback!

Adam
May 9th, 2002, 06:30 PM
cyberhh

How much memory do you have avail and how much is used? If you have plenty of avail RAM you could create 2 identical RAM disks and copy the file over the network eliminating the IDE bus completely.

Are you coping the file using drag and drop or from the DOS prompt?

Create 2 boot disks with DOS, NIC drivers and MS networking files (try bootdisk.com or send me some mail for a disk) then rn your test from DOS. Try it again with a RAM drive and graph the diference.
May 10th, 2002, 04:25 AM
Feet

<blockquote>quote:<hr />Originally posted by AKautz:
Feet,
The Linsys Etherfast 10/100 NIC does support bus mastering. However, even if it did not support bus mastering, if the CPU was relatively idle, would bus mastering make that much of a performance difference? BTW, I tested the transfer with one 220 MB ZIP file.
<hr /></blockquote>1) Erm, to a certain extent, yes, but it would still be faster (i'm not even going to think about how much)
2) Cool

Yeah, HDD transfer maybe, i not got the figures to hand, but t'other day i transfered 1.4Gb between PCs and it was done by the time i'd had a pi$$, so that's about what? max of 30s? That's at least 23Mb/s and prolly more.

I'm gonna go take a look at what kinda speeds i can get and get back to you

Feet starts looking around for a nice little util to test his bandwidth with - ideas?
May 10th, 2002, 01:55 PM
AKautz

cyberhh,
I'm running with about 384 MB of Crucial PC133 SDRAM with about 225 MB in use at the time I transferred the 220 MB file via Explorer, cut and paste.
I like the RAM disk idea a lot, but I don't know how to go about getting DOS drivers for my Linksys NICs; I don't see anything listed at the Linksys site. Any suggestions?

Feet,
Looking forward to your test results. In regards to the time it took for the 1.4 Gb transfer you mentioned, I think I average about 90 seconds (including hand washing of course). Either way, that's much faster than my setup. In fact, it's much faster than my hard drive can transfer to another hard drive on the IDE bus that I have. What is your bus rated at?Are your D-Link NICs 1000 Mbps NICs?
May 14th, 2002, 03:03 PM
tempdir

Eliminate the hardware by using the diagnostic tools on the linksys disks.

then

do the workstations have IPs. ping one from the other and see what the times are.

typical pinging should be 120 ms.

I sort of agree with the IDE but not really though, there is enough of a buffer and cache for that.
May 14th, 2002, 07:58 PM
***steve***

After you get to about 30 megs a second you will hit your hard drives limit about. You should also consider getting rid of all protocols execpt tcpip and just run that one and mabey IPX if you have games or programs that need it. Netbeui is a terrible protocol that was built for 10baseT networks that were very small.
May 14th, 2002, 09:41 PM
format c:

How fast are your drives, If you are running ata 33 drives then that will be the problem, Your drives are slow compared to my ata 100 drives , One of my systems is running ata 100 in a raid 0 configuration , This is very quick , I also set the PCI latency to 64 rather than 32 ( recommended by promise )
This system is pretty quick in file transfers, I would suggest setting your PCI latency to 64 for large file trnasfers and if your drives are slow go for an ata 100 drive on an ata 100 controller, If you have an ata 100 drive as master and the slave is a slower drive than your transfer speed for both drives is at the slower drive speed EG Primary master ata 100, primary slave pio made 4 = pio made 4 on the primary controller , make sure your cd rom is on the secondary controller and keep your primary hard drive seperate if possible , Do not put an older slower drive in the primary chain
May 14th, 2002, 09:43 PM
lph

100 Mega Bits per second, at half duplex, is
50/8= 6.25 MegaBytes/sec. Ethernet also suffers
from collisions, and protocols require header
info to be added to the data packets. Netbeui
is a low end protocol. IPX/SPX is more efficient
in my experience, and results in better throughput. Try uninstalling Netbeui, adding
IPX, and make sure that file/printer sharing
is only bound on IPX. Run your time test after
reboot and you will find that the speed is limited
most by your hard drives - the slowest drive
is the weakest link. Check your BIOS and drivers
to insure that UDMA-100 is possible if your
hard drives can handle it (up to 133 on the
big new ones.)

To take advantage of higher network speeds, you
must get RAID, preferably with Ultra-160 SCSI
drives. This is why these drives are used in servers.
May 15th, 2002, 05:25 AM
Fubar

Good call to limit the number of protocols is use. If don't really need it don't use it. No chance your PCs/cable are near a copier is there. Have heard bad stories about the interfearence they generate.
May 15th, 2002, 06:34 AM
Milenko

You could always try a different hub/switch. You said that you are using a SMG Router. I don't know if you have access to any other equipment, but maybe you could try a 100 Mbps hub or switch.

I just sent a 315 MB rar file from my workstation to on of my servers and it transferred in 32 seconds. So you've definately got a problem there. I'm running on the 100% switched network though, so I doubt you'll get those speeds unless you have a switch.
May 15th, 2002, 08:44 AM
sheller29

I've run into this many times before, and there hasn't been a clear cut answer to improve performance. The first thing I always try is changing the settings in the NIC properties. If the NICs are set to 'auto detect' for line/link speed I force them to 100 Full Duplex. Try this one PC at a time and look for speed changes. I've seen changes, both good (faster speeds) and bad (decreased speeds) when doing this. At home I have a 2K file server and a few XP boxes. Some have Intel NICs, and some have Netgear. When I send to the server my network utilization is always around 75% - This is with a DMA 100 drive on the server running on a DMA 66 onboard controller. If I cant get the speed up with a software change, trying a new NIC, preferably a different name brand is the next step... I've heard Netbeui is a faster protocol to use for p2p networking but around 7MB/Second isn't too bad with tcp/ip. Good Luck!
May 15th, 2002, 09:28 PM
Budster64

<blockquote>quote:<hr />Originally posted by lph:
100 Mega Bits per second, at half duplex, is
50/8= 6.25 MegaBytes/sec. Ethernet also suffers
from collisions, and protocols require header
info to be added to the data packets. Netbeui
is a low end protocol. IPX/SPX is more efficient
in my experience, and results in better throughput. Try uninstalling Netbeui, adding
IPX, and make sure that file/printer sharing
is only bound on IPX. Run your time test after
reboot and you will find that the speed is limited
most by your hard drives - the slowest drive
is the weakest link. Check your BIOS and drivers
to insure that UDMA-100 is possible if your
hard drives can handle it (up to 133 on the
big new ones.)

To take advantage of higher network speeds, you
must get RAID, preferably with Ultra-160 SCSI
drives. This is why these drives are used in servers.<hr /></blockquote>ATA-100/133MBps are theoretical burst rates. Usually maximum sustained external I/O speeds hover anywhere between 20 to 33MBps.
And while it is true that external I/O transfer rates can reach a maximum of 160MBps for SCSI 160 15K discs that is the maximum transfer rates, minimum being closer to round about 60MBps and average somewhere between that. The real reason SCSI drives are used in servers are not only because of the max transfer rates but also faster seek times and most importantly greater throughput. The ability to "serve" files to a much higher number of users than an EIDE drive can ever handle is clearly the truly decisive reason to use SCSI over EIDE drives in the server environment.
I haven't seen yet a compelling reason to use very expensive SCSI 160 15K discs on a normal desktop, the price for the setup is extremely prohibitive.
Actually I think Milenko hit on a good one, using a switching hub/router can make all the difference on a network. Along with suggestions made by many others concerning protocols and adjustments. And of course the HD's specs can also contribute to the speed and efficiency.
May 18th, 2002, 11:09 PM
AKautz

Update:

I decided to create two RAM disks on each one of the machines I am transferring between (one XP machine and one NT), using an app called RamDiskNT (they also have a 9x version) available at <a href="http://www.cenatek.com." target="_blank">www.cenatek.com.</a> The max RAM disk size I was able to create on the NT machine was only 12 MB (a far cry from the original 220 MB test file). So using a single file approximately 12 MB in size and still going through the SMG router using NetBEUI, I was able to achieve a transfer in about 3 seconds going from the XP to the NT machine and in less than 2 seconds (more than 6 MB per second!) going from the NT machine to the XP. The XP is using PC 133 SDRAM while I think the NT machine is using 66 MHz SDRAM in an old Dell Dimension with a P166. So as "format c:" and lph hinted at, it does appear that a signigicant amount of slowdown was occuring at the hard drives. Perhaps now I will try transferring via TCP/IP and changing some of the hardware settings in the Linksys cards, just to see if I can further increase the transfer speed.

Thanks for all the helpful suggestions!
May 25th, 2002, 06:38 AM
gutted

2 things:

Had same problem here (see other post I started) but it was partially resolved by setting my NIC to *half* duplex. Although my NIC can support full duplex, the crappy cheapo card in our fileserver apparently only supports half duplex. So I set my card to half duplex nd am now running at a half decent speed again.

Also - can't remember details, but there is a KB on M$ website that gives info on Win2k writing to NT. If the source is Win2k and the destination is NT, Win2k will try to write "large word format" or something - NT doesn't support this in write mode but only in read mode. This means that transfer from 2k to NT will be much sloer. There is a workaround. Like I said, can't remember the details, but have it noted down at work. Post if interested and I'll check back on Monday.
June 15th, 2002, 09:26 AM
AKautz

Update #2:

I've been learning about different factors that affect network speeds. According to results published in an article at Tom's Hardware Guide at <a href="http://www6.tomshardware.com/network/01q3/010820/index.html" target="_blank">http://www6.tomshardware.com/network/01q3/010820/index.html</a> there can be significant performance differences (including the amount of work passed to the PC's CPU) among different brand / models of 10/100 cards when running under Windows 9x, Me, but not so much under 2K supported cards (with the exception of a PC's CPU utilization).

The article at Tom's Hardware Guide also provides a link to a free network performance app at <a href="http://www.netiq.com/qcheck/default.asp" target="_blank">http://www.netiq.com/qcheck/default.asp</a> which I have not tried yet.

I also found a discussion at <a href="http://www.dslwebserver.com/forums/ubb/Forum9/HTML/000001.html" target="_blank">http://www.dslwebserver.com/forums/ubb/Forum9/HTML/000001.html</a> to be interesting. For Win98 machines, one poster named Glen claims that by enabling TCP Large Windows and SackOpts and changing the default receive window to 372300, he is able to get 89MBps out of his Win98 LAN, using Netgear FA311tx NICs (which he said performed better than his Dlink 530TX+es NICs), although I wonder if such a setting would adversely affect data integrity in Internet communication since the window size determines how much data the sending host can send before waiting for acknowledgments from the receiver: <a href="http://www.microsoft.com/WINDOWS2000/techinfo/reskit/en/CNET/cnbc_imp_fuzn.htm" target="_blank">http://www.microsoft.com/WINDOWS2000/techinfo/reskit/en/CNET/cnbc_imp_fuzn.htm</a>

For more information about how to set TCP window size, SackOpts, and other TCP features I found this article at SpeedGuide.net helpful:
<a href="http://www.speedguide.net/Cable_modems/cable_registry.shtml" target="_blank">http://www.speedguide.net/Cable_modems/cable_registry.shtml</a>

this Microsoft article:
<a href="http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-GB;q224829" target="_blank">http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-GB;q224829</a>

and the Windows 2000 Server TCP/IP Networking Guide at
<a href="http://www.microsoft.com/technet/treeview/default.asp?url=/technet/prodtechnol/windows2000serv/reskit/tcpip/part1/tcpch02.asp" target="_blank">http://www.microsoft.com/technet/treeview/default.asp?url=/technet/prodtechnol/windows2000serv/reskit/tcpip/part1/tcpch02.asp</a>

Part 6, Chapter 31 of the Windows 98 Resource Kit also provides explanations of several TCP/IP registry settings in Win98:
<a href="http://www.microsoft.com/technet/treeview/default.asp?url=/TechNet/prodtechnol/win98/reskit/part6/wrkc31.asp" target="_blank">http://www.microsoft.com/technet/treeview/default.asp?url=/TechNet/prodtechnol/win98/reskit/part6/wrkc31.asp</a>

From what little I know however, if a computer connects to the Net, TCP/IP should not be used for file and print sharing due to security vulnerabilities (esp. for "always on" Cable and DSL connections), unless a separate NIC is used for the Net connection. So if this is true, why is Microsoft phasing out NetBEUI?
June 16th, 2002, 07:25 AM
yingling

I noticed the same problem on my Windows XP/ W2K Server connection when moving 11 GB between the two. Everyone said that my Asante networking hardware was to blame...maybe even the IDE bus on all my drives. I read a few articles on Quality of Service (QoS) and decided to uninstall it from my XP machine all together. Now moving that same 11GB it averages 50 MB and spikes to around 70-75 MB. I was amazed at the jump in performance. Might be worth a shot.

<a href="http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;q316666">Here's one artilce from MS</a>

"As in Windows 2000, programs can leverage QoS through the QoS application programming interfaces (APIs) in Windows XP. One hundred percent of the network bandwidth is available to be shared by all programs unless a program specifically requests priority bandwidth. This "reserved" bandwidth is still available to other programs unless the requesting program is sending data. By default, programs can reserve up to an aggregate bandwidth of 20 percent of the underlying link speed on each interface on an end computer. If the program that reserved the bandwidth is not sending enough data to utilize it completely, the unused portion of the reserved bandwidth is available for other data flows on the same host."
June 23rd, 2002, 12:11 PM
xtac

Hello,

NetBEUI is being phased out because it is a pig and not routable.

To test actuall throughput fom machine to machine try (search google):

1. iperf - I found this to be a great test that does not take into consideration CPU, Socks, etc.

2. NetCPS - Uses winsocks thus limited by CPU if you are using older machines. Look at Task Manager when using this to watch CPU utilization.

I hope this helps.