Hi there

I'm running a dell optiplex gx110 as a headless debian/torrentflux box and wondering what sort of throughput speeds i will get if i upgrade my network to gigabit speeds?

some specs of the pc:

p3 866mhz
384mb ram
headless configuration
debian etch
proftpd

assuming i use:
- short cat6 cables,
- reputable gigabit switch like the LINKSYS EG005W 10/100/1000Mbps Gigabit Workgroup Switch (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16833124021)
- pci (33mhz) gigabit nic like the Intel PWLA8391GT 10/ 100/ 1000Mbps PCI PRO/1000 GT Desktop Adapter (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16833106121).

What sort of speeds should I see? My regular rig is a WinXP AMD/Newcastle with an integrated realtek gigabit chip.

All depends really. You might beable to get GB speeds on the network but if you're writing data to and from a location, can your drives write and read at such speeds? You won't or at least I've never seen anything at true GB speed, there are plenty of other hardware and factors involved.

Where exactly are you wanting to see or achieve such speed at? At what layer?

trickykid,

i can accept that the pci bus and the ata controller on the gx110 is likely to prevent me from getting to 1gbps.

my question really was, what am i likely to see?

to answer your question, i am looking at file transfer speeds. eg. if i ftp a 1gB file from the gx110, how long would it take? thats the bottomline, aint it? if the ata controller can't keep up with the nic, i'm sure tcp will back down the data transfer speeds.

Well, only one way to find out isn't there. Test it. I don't have a GX110 so I couldn't give you an accurate number, it would all be guesstimates.

I get about 350Mbps from most of my machines. The only machine faster is an HP Proliant ML115 server which can cope with two clients simultaneously maxing out at about 600Mbps. However, that is probably down to the hard disk speed of the server which although SATA is only capable of about 80MB/sec.

Try to find the bottleneck:
1. ata = MBps ?
2. PCI 33 MHz = MBps ?
3. RAM (133Mhz I presume) = MBps ? (I found memtest interesting...)
4. Try ping -f <ip> and see?
5. try to nc /dev/zero between the two machines?
I can thing of many ways...

bottomline the fun ends on the bottleneck :-(
;-)

Heh, also it matters how much other traffic is on the network. Lets say you have 2 users on a 1.5 Mbit broadband connection, it is almost theoretically halved. Though in my experience, the user whose doing that huge transfer or doing VoIP calls destroys your throughput.

Also, depends how talkative your network is, packets per second on the switch/router. UDP has less overhead as well vs TCP.