Very Slow Gigabit

[Guest]

I have been working on this problem for over a month with Netgear support,
and still don't have an answer to this problem.

I started off with just the Tower system and Laptop1, which I always use as
my home test system using the Laptop as my transportation vehicle. I load
files at work, and copy to the tower when I get home so I can work on stuff
over the weekend, and also as an offsite backup of a backup.

I upgraded to gigabit by replacing the Linksys 10/100 card bus adapter in my
Laptop, installing a Netgear GA511 Gigabit adapter. I disabled the Intel
Pro/100 internal adapter in my Tower, and installed a Netgear GA311 PCI
Gigabit adapter. I then hooked them up to a Netgear GS105 Gigabit Switch with
Cat5E cables.

The transfer times were slower than with my old hardware!! I have been on
the phone with Netgear support on a weekly basis, and spent hours trying
different settings of the adapters, and swaping cables. I found out the
chipset on the adapters were made by Realtek so I downloaded and tested with
their drivers, same results. SLOW SLOW transfer!!

I then bought a Linksys EG1032 adapter that also uses a Realtek chipset with
the same results.

My son came to town with his laptop that has a built in Intel Pro/1000, and
we ran the following tests.


1. Tower system: IBM NetVista Pentium 4 CPU 2.4GHz with Netgear GA311 set
1000m/full duplex

2. Laptop1 system: IBM Thinkpad 600X Pentium 3 CPU 448 MHz with Netgear
GA511 set 1000m/full duplex

3. Laptop2 system: IBM Thinkpad T41P Pentium M CPU 1700 MHz with internal
Intel Pro/1000 set 1000m /full duplex

All systems run Windows XP SP2, and connect with Cat5E cable through a
Netgear GS105 switch. All test were run transfering a 100 Mbyte file. The
file was transfered to and from each system to the other two systems, and all
times recorded as below. The tranfer times between systems were affected by
the system initiating the transfer.

INITIATING SOURCE TARGET TIME
SYSTEM

Laptop1 Laptop1 Laptop2 2 Min 10 Sec
Laptop1 Laptop2 Laptop1 5 sec

Laptop1 Laptop1 Tower 48 sec
Laptop1 Tower Laptop1 50 sec

Laptop2 Laptop2 Laptop1 10 sec
Laptop2 Laptop1 Laptop2 5 sec

Laptop2 Laptop2 Tower 43 sec
Laptop2 Tower Laptop2 4 sec

Tower Laptop1 Tower 44 sec
Tower Tower Laptop1 30 minutes

Tower Laptop2 Tower 44 sec
Tower Tower Laptop2 4 sec


Any help with this would be welcome.

 

[Jack \(MVP\)]

Hi
In my opinion Giga Network is not ready for prime time usage with Home Networks.

While using Regular well tuned 100Mb/sec. Home Network most people would get a
Bandwidth of 60-80Mb/sec. (b=bit) that would translate into 7-10MB/sec. (B=Byte).

As a result 100MB file should take 10-15 sec. to transfer.

The 4 sec. transfer of 100MB file represents more then twice the "Speed" of 100mb/sec.
which is quite common outcome using Home Giga Network. Laptops in particular are not a
good way to evaluate fast Network.

Home Giga Network - http://www.ezlan.net/giga.html

Setting Peer to Peer Giga network - http://www.ezlan.net/giga_net.html
Jack (MVP-Networking).

 

[Jetro]

Unlock LinkSpeed/Duplex mode and set it to AutoSense.

 

[Guest]

I have tried it many times with Auto Negotiate on. Today I picked up all my
Gigabit stuff and went to another location that has a system almost like my
Tower system. First I tried using my laptops Linksys 10/100, and the Tower
10/100. The transfer time for 100mB file was 1 min 45 sec both ways. I then
installed the Gigabit stuff and the transfer time was 5 sec from the laptop,
and
15 sec back to the laptop. I also checked the CPU usage with Task Mgr and it
showed both at about 20%. The Tower at home will go to 100% for a few seconds
then drop to 7-10% for the remainder of the transfer. I just don't
understand why
the performance is slower with the Gigabit cards installed on my home Tower
system.

 

[Guest]

I am experiencing a very similar problem. I just recently went gigabit and
was stupid and didn't thoroughly research hardware like I usually do and now
that I am not seeing the gigabit performance jump I was expecting all the
talk of jumbo frames and all the different MTU sizes is driving me nuts
trying to figure out what is right for my setup.

First off I have a file server computer running XP Professional that is
pretty fast and a gaming desktop which also runs XP Professional. The heart
of the problem is this, when I drop a file onto the mapped drive of my file
server I get 8% network utilization in task manager sending files. However
when I drag a file FROM my file server I get around 18% network utilization.
While this is considerably faster I was expecting much more. At one time I
was able to get in the upper 20s but no more. Is it too ambitious to expect
upper 30s or lower 40s? Also unexplicably the "system" process in task
manager eats up 100% cpu usage for the duration of the file transfers. The
file transfer speed does not change whether its on the SATA drive or PATA
drive also. Below is a description of my hardware setup. I hope one of you
has a suggestion because i'm pretty stumped.

===File Server Computer===
Asus A7N8x Deluxe
Athlon XP 2500+ Barton core (overclocked to 2800+ 2.09 Ghz) w/512kb l2 cache
1.5 Gigs of PC-3200 DDR400
Netgear GA311 32bit PCI NIC
60GB Maxtor ATA133 (system drive)
200GB WD ATA100
320GB WD SATA150
---GA311 advanced settings---
Jumbo frames - ENABLE
Link speed/duplex mode -1000Mbps/Full Duplex
Offload Checksum - Tx/Rx Checksum
Offload TCP_Large Send - ENABLE

There is no setting for MTU in advanced settings for the GA311 but I did use
DrTCP from dsl reports to have windows set the MTU to 9000 with a TCP Receive
window of 256960 on both computers


===Gaming Computer===
Asus SK8V
AMD Opteron 144 w/hypertransport overclocked to 212mhz @1.9 ghz
1 gig Corsair PC-3200
Integrated 3com Gigabit LOM 3C940 (drivers come from the 3C2000 family)
(2) 36 gig WD Raptor drives in RAID0 (system drive)

----3C940 Advanced Settings---
Flow Control - Asymmetrical and Symmetrical
Hardware Checksumming - On (zero and 1 are options but i'm not sure what
those mean)
Link speed - 1 (not sure what that means)
Maximum frame size - 1514 (I have tried increasing this to 9000 and 7500. At
9,000 web pages don't load for me and my network connection to my file server
stalls and times out. At 7500 I can browse the web but my network connection
to the file server still does the same behavior.)
Media Type - 1000Mb, Full Duplex
Number of Receive buffers - 50
Number of Transmit Buffers - 50

There are a few other settings that seemed unimportant that I didn't list so
feel free to ask if I missed a setting

===Switch==
D-Link DGS-1005D Gigabit switch
Both computers are connected to the switch with CAT6 cable