10/100 FastEthernet -- Anybody getting close to 100 Mbps on file transfers? <EDIT>Problem Solved--I now get 88Mbps.

[Fuzzymath]

I've been trying different things to get faster file transfer speeds with my &quot;10/100 Fast Ethernet Network Adapters&quot; but I can't seem to get much over 10 Mbps.

This is just peer-to-peer from a desktop to a laptop with a crossover cable. I've tried it using NeTBEUI or TCP/IP and the speeds are about the same. I'm set up at Full Duplex and 100baseTX on both rigs.

DESKTOP = Asus A7V133, Athlon 900 @ 1005 (134 x 7.5), Intel InBusiness PCI NIC.

LAPTOP = Dell Latitude CPxJ, P3 650Mhz (100 x 6.5), 3Com 3CXSH572BT PC-Card NIC.

Here's how I'm figuring my speed. I use a stopwatch to time the transfer of a file that is 86,885,393 bytes (or 82.8 Mbytes). It takes 65 seconds to complete the transfer. So, 86,885,393 / 65 = 1,336,698 bytes per sec. So, 1,336,698 (bytes) x 8 (bits) = 10,693,586 bits per sec. So it looks like my transfer speed is 10.7Mbps.

I was just curious if anyone with a similar setup was getting close to 100 Mbps or even 50 Mbps.

 

[randal]

I've done a couple of ramdrive tests to try and get up to 100mb/s ... it was a while back: had 2 p2-450s w/ 256mb of ram each ... each had a 128mb ram drive made, and I copied a 100MB file from one computer's ram drive to the other's ram drive. iirc, it maxed out at just over 80mb/s, but was averaging right around 72mb/s ... so, getting 100mb/s is not really super-possible, especially if it's not under certain conditions. HD speed, cpu speed, memorys speed, Cable length, signal degradation, how much of the cable is not twisted and a bunch of other factors have to do with it.

$.02
randal

 

[jkresh]

It seems that you are confusing MB with Mb (megabyte with megabit, hardrives are measured in bytes, while network speed is in bits, divide bits by eight to get bytes.)

 

[blstriker]

The fastest NIC I tested averaged 73.4 Mbits/second for transfering files (without network overhead). I tested 11 NIC's and have their speeds. Check it out: Network Card Roundup

You should definitly get over 50 Mbits/second on a 100 Mbps network.

 

[bex0rs]

When I was testing out my new ipnat / ipf setup under FreeBSD, I did some transfer tests on my network. Here is how I had things layed out:

Client on &quot;internal network&quot; (P3-1000, ide 7200 rpm drive, Intel NIC) <-> SMC 16-port switch <-> FreeBSD nat / firewall (Cel-700 w/ dual port Intel NIC) <-> Generic 8-port switch <-> FreeBSD ftp server on &quot;external network&quot; (Dual P2-350, scsi 10k drive, w/ Compaq NIC)

All network components were running at 100mbit full duplex. In my unofficial test, I transferred a 200 MB file via FTP from the machine on my internal network to the FreeBSD server on the external network. (Note that the data was passing through 2 switches and 4 network cards.) I was fairly astonished when the dos ftp client reported throughput of 11300KB/s ~ 90mbit/s.

However, I've never been able to achieve throughput like that between 2 windows clients via windows file sharing. The best I've done there was around 4MB/s.

On your setup, Fuzzymath, it could be that the bus of the PC card is limiting network throughput. You may also get better results by testing ftp transfers.

~bex0rs

 

[TonyB]

Has anyone done speed tests under Linux OS? I believe or so ive heard that Linux OS's have lesser network overhead compared to Window OS's translating to faster speeds under Linux.

 

[Fuzzymath]

I posted this question over at ARs and got some good responses. Here's the LINK if anyone's interested.

 

[Fuzzymath]

I didn't know about the difference a Cardbus PCMCIA NIC makes.

I had an older PCMCIA NIC that turned out to be Cardbus. That made all the difference in the world.

My transfer speed went from 10Mbps to 88Mbps!

 

[Ender78]

Tony B,

I'm working on a networking research project right now and I've been able to attain speeds of 96 Mbps using TCP and 98 using UDP Both boxes are Dell 677 with 3COM Nics (Running RH 7.1 - Patched to the 2.4.5 Kernel)

 

[ScottMac]

Was the 96Mbps measured at the transmit or receive side? UDP transmits real well....but many times loses alot of packets along the way....

TCP is slower, but much more reliable.

FWIW

Scott

 

[kormaster]

arg!

 

[Ender78]

ScottMac,

The receiver I've used a few pieces of software for my tests

IPERF
TTCP

And the good old FTP.

 

[Fuzzymath]

Follow up.

When I reported 88Mbps I was using NetCPS. It tests thruoghput only (NICs and cables). It excludes the slow down from your hard drives.

You can get it here: http://www.nfe.com/winfiles/net-manage/net-manage.html

When I actually copy a file I can see a big difference between my desktop and my laptop.

DESKTOP hdd = two 30GB 7200RPM Maxtors in RAID 0
LAPTOP hdd = 18GB 4200RPM Fujitsu


When performing transfers with DESKTOP:
From DESKTOP to LAPTOP = 26Mbps
From LAPTOP to DESKTOP = 50Mbps

When performing transfers with LAPTOP:
From DESKTOP to LAPTOP = 37Mbps
From LAPTOP to DESKTOP = 43Mbps


Considering the hardware, this is acceptable.