keyboard slows down possible network issue -???
 

I just installed RH 9 and am pretty much a newbie at this whole thing.

I noticed something weird happening. When I am typing at a command line from my windows machine, I noticed that there is a delay from when I type to when it gets shown on the screen. This usually only happens when I am typing fairly fast, lets say 30WMP. But it gets quite annoying waiting for a word to show up, and then typing backspace, and waiting to see if backspaced the correct number of times.

I think it may be a network issue because well I havent changed anything on the machine other than during the installation it asked for incoming services and I check off ssh and ftp.

Another simple test that I ran is this. I tried loading emacs and a C program I wrote that was about 400 lines.

On my windows machine using SSH it took 46 seconds for it to fully render the window.

From a friend's RH 9 machine in a different town over cable modem it took 19 seconds.

When I sit down locally at the console, neither the typing problem appears, and emacs loads in about 2 seconds.

Finally since I am running an X-Server (Xwin32) on my windows machine, I noticed that not much data is actually being sent to the windows machine, IE it sends a bit, stops, sends a bit more, stops. (using taskmanager in winxp).

I am connected to the machine through a 100MB switch, so that isn't the issue.

Here is the setup

AMD Athlon 800
512 RAM
40GB HD

I am the only person connected, and like I said I just installed it yesterday, with the default of everything installed. I did actually use redhat-config-network to input my hostname (where does this get stored btw??).

Other than that no changes. Is there anywhere I should be looking to begin trying to trace the problem.

>waiting for a word to show up, and then typing backspace,
Learn to touchtype and not make mistakes ;-)

>a delay from when I type to when it gets shown on the screen.
>This usually only happens when I am typing fairly fast, lets say 30WMP.

This might just be a thing called the nagle algorithm. It takes
much more overhead to send 5 packets/second containing 5 keypresses
then it does to send one packet every two seconds containing 10 keypresses.

I suggest using puTTY which has the nagle algorithm disabled by default.

>On my windows machine using SSH it took 46 seconds for it
>to fully render the window.
>From a friend's RH 9 machine in a different town over cable
>modem it took 19 seconds.

That not good. Perhaps the packets are being routed out to the internet
then back in again. Have you got the machines in the same subnet
with the same netmask? Are you connecting to an LAN ip address or
your internet ip address?

>IE it sends a bit, stops, sends a bit more, stops.
There is a way that a network can be misconfigured so that every other
packet gets lost and the ethernet layer waits to retry. Wish I could
remember what it is, anyone?

If you ping between the machines do you get any lost packets?