GIGe ethernet and Abit

[The JoJo]

I'm about to do a Cougtek with my motherboard in my fileserver!

The host is a Abit KT7A, ATI 8MB rage something agp graphics, 3com 100mb/s nic and a new Allied Telesyn AT2915T gigabit nic.
First I had WinXP installed on the computer, and the drivers for the nic. Copying (smb and ftp) stuff from this computer to 2 others (One WinXP and one Linux) was very slow, about 1MB/s. Between the 2 other hosts, the speed was about 20+MB/s.

I then installed RH Linux instead of the WinXP, and the speed was about the same. I then switched PCI slots a few times, but no help.

I'm using a Zyxel 105 5 port gige switch. Cat6 cables (1 meter). Only having 2 cables in the switch didn't help.

Any ideas? Other than dumping the MB?

I'm thinking about the MB because this one (KT7A quirks...) can't handle any high performance graphics cards, like Geforce2 or Geforce4 (Apparently it can't supply enough power). So maybe it can't supply enought power to the NIC? I didn't try to pull out the 3com nic and then try again. All computers have 2 nics by the way. (A7v600 with integrated gige nic + 3com and an a7v400 with the same AT gige nic and integrated broadcom fast ethernet nic.)

Could some BIOS changes help with this problem?

 

[Jan Kivar]

I'd try the other AT gig card and/or different cable to the ABit first. That sounds like half/full duplex autonegotiation is not working correctly (low speeds), but I have no experience with gigE gear...

Cheers,

Jan

 

[The JoJo]

Yeah, I'm just about to shutdown the 2 computers and swap cards.
I tried different ports in the switch.

When the module is loaded it reports it as 1000 mbps full duplex though.

My first try with gige gear too, and it's starting to ...bug me...

 

[Buck]

Time for some rum JoJo.

 

[The JoJo]

Rum...VERY tempting at the moment.....

....


...

Burning my first DVD+R with my Plextor now! After that it's shutdown time.

Ahh, the hell with it, I'll go get a Stroh! Thanks Buck!
Tell bartender to fill the glass to the brim, willya? Thanks.

 

[The JoJo]

Had to go to sleep last night, I was too tired to start swapping after the burning.
2 burns later, I can atleast say that my Plex burns dvd+r disks ok. Half an hour for about 90-95% full disk with verification.

I'll swap cards today immediately after I get home. (In about 8 hours)

 

[The JoJo]

Swapped cards. Now both have an about equal speed, varying between 11-15MB/s. I just swapped the cards, neither LInux nor windows seemed to have noticed anything. So I have no explanation about why the speed was so bad on the other one yesterday.

I wonder what the problem is, as I do expect to get a little more speed out of it. I did get over 20MB/s between my Windows and the other linux a few days ago. Wonder where that speed went?

 

[The JoJo]

I found this article again:
http://www.digit-life.com/articles2/gigeth32bit/gig-eth-32bit-2.html

I just might try to see what speed I'll get if I omit the switch. Just for testing of bottlenecks.

 

[Buck]

Nice article, but why did they use RedHat 7.3? As far as desktop environments go, the newer versions are much better.

 

[The JoJo]

I got the following results from netperf ( this is from linux to linux, with options -c -C -H IP):

TCP STREAM TEST to 192.168.2.2
Recv Send Send Utilization Service Demand
Socket Socket Message Elapsed Send Recv Send Recv
Size Size Size Time Throughput local remote local remote
bytes bytes bytes secs. 10^6bits/s % T % T us/KB us/KB

87380 16384 16384 10.00 285.31 5.80 20.19 1.665 5.798

 

[The JoJo]

That didn't look too good.... I'll post some more numbers later, if someones interested.

 

[blakerwry]

please use the "code" tag to get the formatting correct.



here's the command I use:

C:>netperf-a4 -H 192.168.0.xxx -l 60

that is a lowercase "L", i find that a test length of 60 seconds gives me better accuracy and more closely approximates large file transfers.

 

[The JoJo]

Uhhh, upgraded to Samba 3, but not much better, getting about 7MB/s speed with that linux-linux

Tried NFS (It seems the latest versions use TCP instead of UDP, so it's a bit better now), and I seem to be getting speeds about 20MB/s.
FTP with cable between computers (no switch) results in about 23MB/s.
With switch, a few MB less.
So I think I'll still try to find a good winnfs client....

And my Winxp is totally f***ed. Gotta reinstall, lousy speed.

 

[blakerwry]

Step 12: Speeding things up: (from: Using Samba (O'Reilly System...)
[global]
log level = 1 # Default is 0
socket options = TCP_NODELAY IPTOS_LOWDELAY
read raw = yes # Default
write raw = yes # Default
oplocks = yes # Default
max xmit = 65535 # Default
dead time = 15 # Default is 0
getwd cache = yes
lpq cache = 30
[okplace]
veto oplock files = this/that/theotherfile
[badplace]
oplocks = no

 

[blakerwry]

something else from O'Reilly.. HDD tuning with HDParm

 

[The JoJo]

Thanks, gotta try that IPTOS, I think that is the only one missing.

Here's a comparison of Samba 3 and Win2k3 when using Netbench:
http://www.itweek.co.uk/ITWeek/itw_graph_1144289.jsp

With one user my MB/s is quite close to those figures (just looking at it visually).

Good link to hdparm. With recent parts, I haven't needed to do any tuning, they've been optimal automatically after install.

 

[blakerwry]

Yeah, i tried to do some hdparm tuning on my fedora file server.... and I found out I was already at optimal speeds... I can increase the speed from cache about 50MB/sec, but actual disk speed doesnt change more than a few hundered KB/sec at most.