2 ethernet bridge = more bandwidth???

A

alanon

Weaksauce
Joined
Sep 8, 2003
Messages
71
The server (Windows 2000 AS) is terribly slow at times and I want to increase the
bandwidth. If I add a second ethernet card to the box and bridge them, the question is..

1) Can two IPs exist on the same server, one for each card?

2) Will it increase the bandwidth for the server?

3) Can you have half the users log onto the server through one card and half on the other?

4) If you have 2 processors, with 2ethernets, will that help improve server performance?
 
1. No, however you *can* have two NICs using NLB that appear as one virtual IP
2. Probably, but that depends on what exactly is slow on the network.
3. NLB automatically takes care of balancing the load. Intel server NICs I believe have software to do load balancing.
4. Again, that depends on what the server is doing, current network performance, # of users, etc.

If you could give some more background information on the problem, then maybe others can offer more suggestions.
 
I thought you could have 2 seprate IP addresses with 2 NICs. I work on a Windows server that hosts 2 websites, the box has 2 cards, one for each site, and each site has it's own IP address.

Now that wouldn't do anything to increase bandwidth like alanon was looking for though because if you connect to either of the sites, you're only downloading from one NIC.
 
Hartlove said:
I thought you could have 2 seprate IP addresses with 2 NICs. I work on a Windows server that hosts 2 websites, the box has 2 cards, one for each site, and each site has it's own IP address.

Now that wouldn't do anything to increase bandwidth like alanon was looking for though because if you connect to either of the sites, you're only downloading from one NIC.
Click to expand...

Ah I think I may have misread what he is trying to do... I though he was saying he wanted 2 nics with the same IP address.......
 
The Windows 2000 AS box is used to host accounting software, norton antivirus scanning,
and file server. The box is so slow (pii 333 512MB) and when 15 users the the server
are either opening up excel worksheets, running quick books, or any other thing, the
workstations take forever to connect to the server.

Now if I add a 2nd NIC to the server and use NLB (software in windows 2000?), will that
help in get getting rid of the bottle neck? or upgrading the server to a new faster dual
processor get rid of the bottleneck?
 
Running two nic's may help, but I would take a look at your hard drives as that will be the slowest part of your computer. Using IDE hard drives when there are lots of connections will lead to a very slow server. I would suggest upgrading to SCSI hard drives and controller. The computer is essentially a file server and that is not too processor dependant.
 
Network Load Balancing wont do what you need. That is used when you have more than one server providing duplicate content.

You need to have two nic's that can be trunked or bonded together, but you also need a switch to connect them too that supports that feature.

alanon, could you provide more info on your network? Such as full specs on the server, what type of hubs or switches you are using, is it a 10base-T or 100-Base-T network?

Then we can go from there.

thx.
 
My guess is it's the disk subsystem is too slow. When I had to run our file server off a single IDE drive once after a crash, my network was slower than shit. Running a scsi raid-5 setup is the way to go. I've got about 50 users hitting on a single proc p3-1133 server w/ 900MB ram and it runs fine. I've got a single 100BaseT card in the server and it's connected to a switch. The disk subsystem is a 2 channel adaptec U160 raid-5 card, and it's connected to 6 seagate 36GB U320 10K disks, 3 on each channel.
 
Yea, I think you are looking at the wrong place. I really doubt that 10-15 users are maxing out your network bandwidth before they max out the hardware specs. Check out the cpu/mem/disk usage when you are getting loaded and go from there.
 
deuce868 said:
Yea, I think you are looking at the wrong place. I really doubt that 10-15 users are maxing out your network bandwidth before they max out the hardware specs. Check out the cpu/mem/disk usage when you are getting loaded and go from there.
Click to expand...


What if he has a hub? That could certainly slow things down quite a bit.
 
Cardboard Hammer said:
If he's got a hub, adding another NIC to his server is just going to make the problem worse.
Click to expand...

Yep.

Even before that, having a hub will slow access down period. Upgrading his server will be pointless.
 
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