Home or Business Gigabit Ethernet Speeds -

[imported_synchro]

I've read briefly about network strategy and advantages of large packet GBE switches etc. - I've always wondered how fast other peoples gigabit LANs are though.

I've got a Netgear 5 port switch that I mostly run large file transfers over -
Measuring speed with DU Meter, I will average about 35MB/Sec and burst into the 50's.

Is this standard for gigabit or should I be higher/lower?

What is your LAN running at speed wise?

 

[Devistater]

are you certain its MEGABYTE/sec that the du meter is measuring?
Cause the 100mb and 1000mb speeds of networks are megaBIT/sec. Which means you need to divide by 8 to get megaBYTE/sec speeds.

So for instance the 100mb theoretical max speed will be 12.5 megabyte/sec
The 1000mb theoretical max will be 125 megabyte/sec.

Your number is reasonable for megabytes/sec but I just wanted to make sure thats how you were writing it.

Once you are hitting up to the speeds you are talking about, 35megabyte/sec you are hitting into hard drive limitations most likely. Even raptor hard drives (the fastest SATA drive availible to purchase, faster than any IDE drive) can't keep the gigabit network fully saturated. A raptor 74g drive (its faster than the 36g version) has sustained transfer rates of 54MB to 72MB depending on if its in the outer sectors or inner sectors.

A quick test shows I'm hitting a max of 20 megabytes/sec when copying from my older computer to my new computer with a raptor. So its obviously the old computer thats is slowing it down, probably because of its slow hard drive.

I played with the settings of the cards and enabled jumbo frames and told it to optimize for throughput rather than CPU usage.

Now I'm having network issues lol. Going to reset see what happens.

 

[imported_netman]

We have fairly easly pushed 800+Mbps speeds (much more than that on Ethernet and you will start having loss) through Cisco Catalyst 3550, 3560, and 3750's. This was with Dell 2650/2850 and 6650/6850's though..

Devistater is correct though.. most transfer rates are reported in MB (Bytes) while the network itself is rated at Mb (Bits). So a 50MBps burst would be 50 * 8 to find out network speed (400Mbps).

 

[imported_synchro]

I have my DU Meter set up for megabytes rather than megabits - I don't like doing the math on the fly so that makes it easier.

I was thinking that I might be slightly limited by my drives but wasn't 100%. The RAID 5 array does very well for me though. Sometimes with 30-100MB files I can't even see them copy across the LAN - There's 256MB of cache on the RAID card and it must just store it all there untill it can write it out to the drives.


Good to know that I'm in the ballpark though. Networking at times is a little strange so I wanted to post and see where I was compared to others speed wise.

Thanks for the reply!

 

[networkman]

400Mbps is as fast as I generally see on my home network, but then these are copper-based 32bit cards with lower end Hawking/Linksys equipment. I imagine an investment in better quality(more expensive) items would have greater speed benefits, but I'm happy with what I have for the price I paid.

 

[JackMDS]

Link to: Peer to Peer Giga Networks

Link to: Setting a Home Giga network.

:sun:

 

[Devistater]

lol I think I figured out why I have issues. The netgear GA311 card I have in the other computer has jumbo frame on/off setting and when its on its 7500 size packet. Wheras the nvidia gigabit I'm using has 4500 and 9000 settings for jumbo packets. I think the 9000 was too much for the crappy netgear.

 

[spidey07]

Originally posted by: Devistater
lol I think I figured out why I have issues. The netgear GA311 card I have in the other computer has jumbo frame on/off setting and when its on its 7500 size packet. Wheras the nvidia gigabit I'm using has 4500 and 9000 settings for jumbo packets. I think the 9000 was too much for the crappy netgear.

might as well see if the switch supports it.

 

[volrath]

I find that an old AXP 2400+ is CPU-limited for transfer speeds with a gigabit addin card, whereas my A8N-SLI machines are not. I saw 475mbits through a switch, and 900 with 1 wire between 2 NICs.

 

[Devistater]

Originally posted by: spidey07

Originally posted by: Devistater
lol I think I figured out why I have issues. The netgear GA311 card I have in the other computer has jumbo frame on/off setting and when its on its 7500 size packet. Wheras the nvidia gigabit I'm using has 4500 and 9000 settings for jumbo packets. I think the 9000 was too much for the crappy netgear.

might as well see if the switch supports it.

Yeah I tried to find documentation on that, its a netgear gigabit switch. But I can't find anything. I'm pretty sure it would support the minimum of 7500 size that the netgear gigabit cards support though.

Besides, I'm thinking that a switch can switch around pretty much any size packets from the 1500 standard to the 9000 jumbo jumbo size.

 

[JackMDS]

Originally posted by: volrath
I find that an old AXP 2400+ is CPU-limited for transfer speeds with a gigabit addin card, whereas my A8N-SLI machines are not. I saw 475mbits through a switch, and 900 with 1 wire between 2 NICs.

You are getting 900Mb/sec. using two regular computers and copper???

:sun:

 

[JackMDS]

Originally posted by: DevistaterYeah I tried to find documentation on that, its a netgear gigabit switch. But I can't find anything. I'm pretty sure it would support the minimum of 7500 size that the netgear gigabit cards support though.

When the Switch is Jumbo capable the Brand is proudly stating it, if there is No mention of MTU it means it is not MTU-9000 capable.

Few Models of the SMC Entry Level Giga switches are capable of Jumbo frames, and are the current preferred solution.

:sun:

 

[azev]

Jumbo Frame = Jumbo Shrimp j/k

Btw dell also has a couple of jumbo frame capable switch for a very reasonable price.

 

[Devistater]

Well what I meant was that I was figuring that netgear, if thier cards entry level gigabit cards support jumbo frames, I'd expect their own entry level gigabit switch to be able to handle them. Of course that's expecting a logical design from a company, often that doesn't happen. I suppose I could call them up and ask heh.

It would help if they included more than just a quick start guide for the switch, not even the website has additional documentation than that.

RE: SMC. Yeah I recently put in a purchase order for someone who needed a 24 port 10/100 switch. I was impressed with them. They were inexpensive and had all the needed specs in documentation that I needed (like making sure the switch was capable of handling a full 200mbit duplex load from each port) , and it works great.

 

[WileCoyote]

I have a SMC 8505T gigabit switch + Cat6 cable and Intel PRO/1000 MT nics. About 15 MB/sec transfering between two computers (sata drives: one wd raptor and one wd 120js). Nothing special. And that's in a server/client setup.

Enabling jumbo frames boosted it from 13MB/sec to 15MB/sec. I kind of expected more with all the hype regarding jumbo frames.

 

[spidey07]

Originally posted by: WileCoyote
I have a SMC 8505T gigabit switch + Cat6 cable and Intel PRO/1000 MT nics. About 15 MB/sec transfering between two computers (sata drives: one wd raptor and one wd 120js). Nothing special. And that's in a server/client setup.

Enabling jumbo frames boosted it from 13MB/sec to 15MB/sec. I kind of expected more with all the hype regarding jumbo frames.

you should be getting MUCH faster than that. Try FTP.

 

[Crusty]

Using NFS in linux i was able to copy a 300mb tv show from a RAID 1 array to a ram disk at arond 650mbps. This is using 8000 byte frames, an SMC switch, Intel PRO/1000 cards and self crimped Cat 5e cables. I am quite happy with it

 

[jonny13]

Transferring from XP to Server2k3 I get about 32MB/s. That is when I am logged onto the server pulling the data from the XP computer. If I am on the XP computer and push the files to the server, I get about 25MB/s. Depending on the file and the drive, I have had speeds in the upper 30's before.

Jonny

 

[Asmodeus097]

I have an odd problem which hopefully some one can provide some answers for. I just recently went gigabit and was stupid and didn't thoroughly research hardware like I usually do and now that I am not seeing the gigabit performance jump I was expecting all the talk of jumbo frames and all the different MTU sizes is driving me nuts trying to figure out what is right for my setup.

First off I have a file server computer running XP Professional that is pretty fast and a gaming desktop which also runs XP Professional. The heart of the problem is this, when I drop a file onto the mapped drive of my file server I get 8% network utilization in task manager sending files. However when I drag a file FROM my file server I get around 18% network utilization. While this is considerably faster I was expecting much more. At one time I was able to get in the upper 20s but no more. Is it too ambitious to expect upper 30s or lower 40s? Also unexplicably the "system" process in task manager eats up 100% cpu usage for the duration of the file transfers. The file transfer speed does not change whether its on the SATA drive or PATA drive also. Below is a description of my hardware setup. I hope one of you has a suggestion because i'm pretty stumped.

===File Server Computer===
Asus A7N8x Deluxe
Athlon XP 2500+ Barton core (overclocked to 2800+ 2.09 Ghz) w/512kb l2 cache
1.5 Gigs of PC-3200 DDR400
Netgear GA311 32bit PCI NIC
60GB Maxtor ATA133 (system drive)
200GB WD ATA100
320GB WD SATA150
---GA311 advanced settings---
Jumbo frames - ENABLE
Link speed/duplex mode -1000Mbps/Full Duplex
Offload Checksum - Tx/Rx Checksum
Offload TCP_Large Send - ENABLE

There is no setting for MTU in advanced settings for the GA311 but I did use DrTCP from dsl reports to have windows set the MTU to 9000 with a TCP Receive window of 256960 on both computers


===Gaming Computer===
Asus SK8V
AMD Opteron 144 w/hypertransport overclocked to 212mhz @1.9 ghz
1 gig Corsair PC-3200
Integrated 3com Gigabit LOM 3C940 (drivers come from the 3C2000 family)
(2) 36 gig WD Raptor drives in RAID0 (system drive)

----3C940 Advanced Settings---
Flow Control - Asymmetrical and Symmetrical
Hardware Checksumming - On (zero and 1 are options but i'm not sure what those mean)
Link speed - 1 (not sure what that means)
Maximum frame size - 1514 (I have tried increasing this to 9000 and 7500. At 9,000 web pages don't load for me and my network connection to my file server stalls and times out. At 7500 I can browse the web but my network connection to the file server still does the same behavior.)
Media Type - 1000Mb, Full Duplex
Number of Receive buffers - 50
Number of Transmit Buffers - 50

There are a few other settings that seemed unimportant that I didn't list so feel free to ask if I missed a setting

===Switch==
D-Link DGS-1005D Gigabit switch
Both computers are connected to the switch with CAT6 cable