Poor Network Performance

[chrisfnet]

I've got a network setup here at home. Following is an image depicting my network setup.

http://i49.photobucket.com/albums/f287/chrisfnet/network-diagram.gif

I'm running Windows XP Professional on my desktop machine. It's connected at 1Gbps. I've got 7' Cat 5e run from it to the switch. I've been testing from a SATA-300 drive to try to eliminate the drive-read limitation as much as possible.. though as low as my performance is.. it wouldn't matter anyway.

I'm running Ubuntu Server on the other machine. It *says* it's a BCM4401 NIC (Broadcom) and by all specs I've seen it supports Gigabit speeds. However, I see no place to negotiate 1000. So... I'm not sure.

At any rate, I'm only getting large file transfer speeds of about 4MBps which bothers me. Even if I were using IDE and 100Mbps.. I should be getting more than 4MBps!

I have jumbo packet transferring on in Windows XP as well.

Any tips/hints for diagnosing and fixing this?

 

[chrisfnet]

Since posting this, I've installed a PCI Gigabit NIC into my Ubuntu Server machine.

sandbox:/home/chris# ethtool eth1
Settings for eth1:
Supported ports: [ MII ]
Supported link modes: 10baseT/Half 10baseT/Full
100baseT/Half 100baseT/Full
1000baseT/Half 1000baseT/Full
Supports auto-negotiation: Yes
Advertised link modes: 10baseT/Half 10baseT/Full
100baseT/Half 100baseT/Full
1000baseT/Half 1000baseT/Full
Advertised auto-negotiation: Yes
Speed: 1000Mb/s
Duplex: Full
Port: Twisted Pair
PHYAD: 1
Transceiver: internal
Auto-negotiation: on
Supports Wake-on: g
Wake-on: d
Current message level: 0x000000ff (255)
Link detected: yes

So both my server AND XP are connected at 1000Mb/s.. so I'm still at a loss.

 

[chrisfnet]

Apparently with the tg3 driver (the PCI NIC I installed), it won't let you disable auto-negotiation AND set it to 1000FD at the same time.

 

[GushpinBob]

I've had this problem when backing up my computers over the network. My speed topped out at around a paltry 50 mbits/sec, but after increasing the MTU size on my ethernet cards from 1500 to their maximum I was getting speeds from 500 to 800 mbits/sec, a more realistic speed expected from a gigabit adapter.

The command in any linux distro is:

ifconfig <adapter> mtu <number>

Sorry, I can't remember what it was in Windows.

 

[chrisfnet]

I've had this problem when backing up my computers over the network. My speed topped out at around a paltry 50 mbits/sec, but after increasing the MTU size on my ethernet cards from 1500 to their maximum I was getting speeds from 500 to 800 mbits/sec, a more realistic speed expected from a gigabit adapter.

The command in any linux distro is:

ifconfig <adapter> mtu <number>

Sorry, I can't remember what it was in Windows.

What were the MTU values that you used?

 

[chrisfnet]

The PCI NIC is BCM5705KFB

I'm guessing it doesn't support jumbo frames or a MTU greater than 1500.. can't get ifconfig to work properly.