How can i get higher transfer speeds on my small LAN?
 

Hi

I am back again at my favourite forum with more "stupid" questions.

I have a small LAN with two Mandrake 9.1 boxes:

In the firewall/router box i have a NC3121 network card using the eepro100 driver, the card should be capable of 100Mbit/sec.

In the other box i have a EtherExpress PRO/100 card using the eepro100 driver, the card should be capable of 100Mbit/sec.

The boxes are connected to a D-LINK DES 1005D Switch (PDF) the switch indicates that i have a 100Mbit/s connection (green light 100Mbit, orange light 10Mbit/s).

iperf indicates that the possible bandwith should be 94.1 Mbits/s.

But when i transfer files between the boxes (NFS) i have about 9Mbyte/s? I get the feeling that everything is not working right.

I have messed with the mii-diag tools trying to force higher speeds but with no luck.

1. Does anyone have some useful tips for me?
2. It should go faster then 9Mbytes/s shouldnt it?
3. Could i check somewere what "metod" i am using (10base, 100baseTx or whatever..)?

Regards
Klas

this doesnt answer your question, but yer getting about 73Mbit/s
what would you possibly want a higher transfer rate for?
to save 2 seconds (literally) on a transferring 100 megs at 93Mbit/s?


u could try buying a couple of those super quality, gold tip, kryponite soldered, superman killing cables from futureshop...

Are you possibly confusing bits/sec with bytes/sec? As Mustard points out, as far as raw data goes, you are getting ~73 Mbits/sec.

At the risk of insulting (please excuse if you already know this) one byte is 8 bits and why the 9 MBytes/sec sounds so much lower than the 100 Mbits/sec of the spec.

Put packet headers and such in there too and I would think you are doing really well.

You won't start getting 100 MBytes/sec unless you upgrade everything to gigabit ethernet - and my bet is that you would see only around 73 MByte/sec due to the same overhead issues there are now.

Thanks for explanation guys.

Yes i think i was confusing bits/s and bytes/s. When you point it out to me, i think i remember learned it back in school.... :study:

I dont have any problem with the transfer speed i have today but i cant stand having hardware wich i dont squezze everything i can out of (i am sure you are familar with that behaviour :) ) . But if you guys say that i have expected transfer speeds, its good enough for me.

Thanks for the lecture!
Klas