Gigabit Network...Slow

[Access_Denied]

Went out and purchased a Dlink GDS-1005D switch, and a Netgear GA311 gigabit pci 32 bit network card. Threw the Netgear card card into my Duron 900 box which is running FreeBsd. Which has a 60 gig hard drive, and a 80 gig hard drive. Both of the hard drives are running off of the primary onboard hard drive controller. Second system is a 3.0 AMD64 cpu. With a 200gig SATA hard drive, and a 120gig IDE hard drive. Running XP. I have just the two computers connected to the new switch. Along with my SMC router connected also. Using just standard cat5 cables. Which I was running with my 10/100 network setup.

When copying from my FBSD system to my XP, the file xfer is around 5-14megs a second. When copying for some reason from my XP to the Fbsd system, it's drops down to around 2-3 megs a second. I'm confused as to why the xfer speeds drop down when going in one direction but not the other. Also confused as to why the xfer speed to is so slow. 5-14 megs a second doesn't cut it. I was getting around 7-8 megs a second before. Going both ways. I'm aware of the huge bottle neck with the pci bus, and the hard drives. But I would expect it to be able to pull 20-30 megs a second. The nic in my fbsd system is my own pci device that is plugged into a slot. The one on the Windows machine, the nic is onboard. Each OS is showing that the device is running at 1000.

I'm using a program called bmon on the fbsd box, and just the windows task manager to look at the speeds. Both are showing about the same.

Any help, suggestions would be great. The cpu usage isn't closed to being pegged out either when xfering.

 

[Bullitt]

More than likely, the drivers for the gigE card on the BSD machine isnt as good as the existing 10/100 card. I've discovered that when going to a firewire network connection on my 'nix box. My xfers are just at 100mbit but my CPU utilization is 95% for a transfer. Compared that with the ethernet interface, my speeds were 79mbit but cpu utilization was only 25%.

Oh, you have a 60gb drive on your BSD system, what's the cache size on those drives, 2MB? That would be about normal for the age of the hardware. You are probably running into a HDD bottleneck issue. Then again, you never mentioned the speeds you saw before switching to GigE.

I believe it boils down to drivers or HDD bottleneck as your BSD system's specs are similar to my 'nix specs and I get similar results.

Ok, I "timed" a 158MB xfer via samba across a 100mbit connection to my fileserver (1ghz Athlon with 2MB cache 7200 RPM drives). It took 17 seconds to xfer 158MB yielding 9MB/sec. I'd have to say you have a driver issue or potentially a MTU issue. See if you are using 1500MTU on both ends or match it up. Also make sure both are speed/duplex settings match up. Half-duplex will kill your speeds. Mismatched MTU settings will also be a PITA.

Edit: what is the CPU utilization when xfering a file?

 

[Access_Denied]

How you adjust the MTU, in both windows and linux? I'm guessing windows is within the properties for the device.

Both both of the drives have 2meg for the cache on the fbsd box. The card uses a realtek chipset, i've had good luck with realtek in the past. Fbsd found the card, and set it to 1000 without any problems.

Thanks for the reply.

btw, i was transferring around 7-8 megs a second with the old 100mbps setup.

 

[Bullitt]

In 'nix its part of the ifconfig command. I am BSD illiterate, sad to say.

Realtek, yes, I've had good luck with realtek, but they are CPU hogs (in 'nix anyways).... I think we have the answer, unfortunately. What about a better quality/hardware based gigE card?

Have you monitored your CPU utilization during an xfer to see if a hardware change might help you out?