Vista Network Performance

[jw]

Hello, folks.

About a week ago, I upgraded my home router to a NetGear WNR854T. My
primary reason for doing this is to support my various wired gigabit
capable machines, while still supporting my one wireless client.

Here are some of the machines that I have on this network.

1 - File Server running FreeBSD and Samba for Windows connectivity.

2 - Windows Vista based workstation.

3 - FreeBSD based workstation.

Now, all of these machines have gigabit ethernet NIC's installed, and are
properly configured hardware wise. Cables from each machine to the
router are all good quality CAT 6.

Here is where the problem begins; I'm seeing extremely poor tx and rx
rates from the Vista machine to all other machines. Here are examples:

1 - Vista <-> FreeBSD Server (Average of 8 MB/s to 12 MB/s transfers)
2 - FreeBSD <-> FreeBSD (Average of 50 MB/s to 60+ MB/s transfers)

That's a rather sizeable difference. I lose about 80+% of my network
performance when Vista is thrown into the loop.

I had then thought that perhaps the NIC in the Vista machine was
wonky, so I installed a small partition with FreeBSD on that machine.
I FTP'd a few ISO images around the network and once again saw
transfer rates exceeding 50+ MB/s, which confirmed that the NIC in the
Vista machine was working as intended.

I'm not sure if it's the NIC driver in Vista that is causing this, or
if it's something else I'm missing. Whatever the case may be, this
is unacceptable performance.

Has anyone else seen this with Vista? Could you perhaps offer
any suggestions that may help to remedy this?

Thank you for your time,
John.

 

[Steve Thackery]

Loads of people are seeing this. Microsoft are working on it. A hotfix is
already available, but hasn't been subjected to the full-blown test program
so it's probably worth waiting a bit.

Steve

 

[Dana Cline - MVP]

Seems like there's a lot of postings about network performance in the
microsoft.public.windows.vista.networking_sharing and
microsoft.public.windows.vista.performance_maintenance newsgroups.

Dana Cline - MCE MVP

 

[jw]

Loads of people are seeing this. Microsoft are working on it. A hotfix is
already available, but hasn't been subjected to the full-blown test program
so it's probably worth waiting a bit.

Thanks for the info - hopefully, something will soon happen with this and
a patch will be available. I'm just a little surprised that if there are
a lot of folks experiencing this issue, a fix or workaround hasn't been
pushed yet. Guess I'll just wait and see.

Thanks,
John.

 

[jw]

Seems like there's a lot of postings about network performance in the
microsoft.public.windows.vista.networking_sharing and
microsoft.public.windows.vista.performance_maintenance newsgroups.

Thanks for the tip on these newsgroups. I didn't see them on my news
server on the first pass. I'll check them out.

Appreciated,
John.