- Jul 29, 2005
- 10
- 0
- 0
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
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