speed up network transfers??

moose517

Gawd
Joined
Feb 28, 2009
Messages
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Hi guys, you all seem to be really knowledgable about networking related stuff so i figured i'd ask here. I want to increase the performance for transfering files across the network because its so slow now. I think the fastest computer transfers at about 40MB/s but all the rest top out around 13MB/s.

I have a d-link DGS-2208 switch with all computers connecting to it. I have disabled TCP/IP 6 on the computers, and set the speed & duplex to 1.0Gbps full duplex becuase i have heard that would help. Supposedly the switch does jumbo frames as well but i can't seem to get that to work, its seems much slower. Also another problem that i have read about is that the switch defaults to 100Mb if there is such device on the network, well my 360 and the modem that verizon provided both run at 100Mb only. All the network cable in the house is good quality cat5e cable as well.

Should i look at replacing the switch with something that will run at full gigabit speeds regardless of other devices attached? I would like one that is 16 ports as well because the 8 on that are filled as it is and i want to get a dual NIC card for my home server. Hope this makes sense, go ahead and ask anything else if you need it.
 
I forget the program, but test your network speeds using a memory fed program.

My money is on your hard drives are your bottleneck.
 
well see thats what i thought as well but the computer with the fastest transfer times also has the slowest hard drive that is really crapped up LOL. The computer with the slowest rate has the fastest drives in it (3x500gb RAID 0). So thats why i assume its the switch or settings on the computer.
 
40 MB/s out of a single drive is perfectly respectable.

But do a synthetic test to rule out hard drive issues.
 
Auto-negotiation is generally recommended for gigabit, and usually works fine. You can cause problems with forced full duplex. Your switch should be fine. If you really have doubts, try a direct connection between two computers. A standard cable should be fine.

40 MB/s is better than most for untuned Windows transfers. The OS itself can be a bottleneck. Which ones are you using?

To see what your network is capable of, factoring out your drives/file system/etc., try using e.g. iperf version 1.7:

server: iperf -s
client: iperf -c server -l 64k -t 15 -i 3 -r

Where server is the name or IP of the remote computer running iperf -s.
 
If your using Vista, that will kill your speeds, i dnt know what MS did, but Vista network speeds have been crap, even after there being apparent fixes in SP1.
 
Edited post:

I was gonna say, I'm having perfectly acceptable 40-50 MB/s transfers with the 5port version of that switch and it's working fine in a mixed speed environment...
BUT I just noticed that those fast speeds are only available when the 10/100mb pc's are turned off and not online on the network.

Dang, this whole mixed speed thing really sucks.

it was cruising at 46 MB/s and then dropped to 12 =(

I think I'm just gonna figure out a way to isolate my gigabit network/switch from the rest of the network.
 
yeah, all the computers in our house run vista except the server, which is 2003. I'll check out iperf later, its late here LOL. i went ahead and set the setting back to default on my desktop just because they weren't helping anyway.
 
all the computers in our house run vista except the server, which is 2003.

For a transfer from a Vista client to 2003, if everything's "tuned", you should pretty much be bottlenecked by the HD's and the network.

E.g. 10GB file transfer at ~110 MB/s from Vista to 2003, using RAID on both ends (MS shows MiB/s but labels it MB/s):

vista-105-MiBps.png
 
interesintg i often go from a server 2008 box to a windows 7 and network seeds suck arse!, when i had both windows 7 i was flying!
 
alright, well i'm gonna make this post resurface, i did a test on my desktop copying a 10gb file and the transfer speed was about 65Mb/s, better for sure. Now my new question is that when my home server is making a backup to anybodys computer i can't really stream a video to like my xbox because it lags so bad, how can i fix this issue if possible?
 
Do you have your cables going around anything crazy? LIke perhaps near the super sized electromagnet your kid is building in the basement for the science fair? Cat 5e is durable stuff but if you have it hanging around something thats pushing out shit tons of EMI that could be causing the issue. Worth looking into.
 
well the network cable for the most part stay away from any sort of magnet, all the networking equipment in my bedroom stays to the left of my subwoofer. The only interference i could see is that the cable for the server is dropped down the heating duct to reach the basement, could that be causing it to crap out like that?

BTW, i'm only 19, no kids LOL.
 
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