What influences the speed of ethernet? I hooked up two computers for file transfer using a simple peer to peer connection with 2 10Mb/s ethernet cards. The file transfer was no faster than using a serial cable and communicating at 115200bps. Is ethernet communicating slower without a hub or what other possible reasons are there for not getting anywhere close to the expected 10Mb/s?
Tek-Tips is the largest IT community on the Internet today!
Members share and learn making Tek-Tips Forums the best source of peer-reviewed technical information on the Internet!
-
Congratulations Chriss Miller on being selected by the Tek-Tips community for having the most helpful posts in the forums last week. Way to Go!
ethernet speed 4
- Thread starter shaunkep
- Start date
-
1
- #2
There's a few things to remember about what you are doing...<br><br>1) The transfer is only going to be as quick as the fastest read or write operation. If one PCs hard disk is quicker than the other, you're going to quickly get into a situation where the disk is a bottleneck. You'll have similar issues if one of the PCs is running, for example, a 486. The CPU has to do the work of receiving the data passed from the Ethernet card to the TCP/IP stack and then decide what to do with it.<br><br>2) Are the network cards PCI or ISA? PCI places less load on the CPU. If one of the PCs is using an ISA card, this is going to be another bottleneck.<br><br>3) Don't forget that Ethernet card speeds are quoted in <i>bits</i> per second. So, 10Mbps is 10000 bps. Your serial port is running at 115200bps. For the simple connection you describe it's possible that you may even get quicker file transfers over the serial cable. However, don't junk the network cards yet! Using network cards gives you more flexibility for how you set up your machines now and in the future. Maybe it's worth investing in some 100Mbps cards at some point in the future if speed is really that big an issue for you. However, for the setup you describe I'd stick with 10Mbps for the minute. It should be more than adequate for peer-to-peer networking requirements.<br><br>4) Finally, it would be possible to get stuck into the real nitty gritty of TCP/IP networking and describe some real good registry hackery for tweaking your IP settings. However, there's an easier way to do this which is to download a utility called MTUspeed. It's available from the usual archives, including TUCOWS. With MTUspeed, you can choose your network connection type, click a button, and restart the PC with good TCP/IP settings for the type of connection you chose. Don't expect miracles from it with Ethernet cards, but it can work wonders with standard dial-up IP.<br><br>So, in summary, start off checking the performance of your PCS, use PCI cards if possible, and tweak your IP settings with MTUspeed.<br><br>Hope this helps 
-
1
- Thread starter
- #3
1) The one PC in question is a Pentium 133, the other is a Pentium 3, 400. <br><br>2) The Pentium 133 is using an ISA NIC card and the 400 is using a PCMCIA card. <br><br>3) By converting the 10M bits/ second to bytes, that would be 1.25M bytes/second. This should still be (theoretically) more than 10 times as fast as the fastest serial connection, right?<br><br>It seems like the local speeds between processor, hard disk, etc. are all still much faster than communicating between computers, but I don't have a whole lot of networking experience so I suppose it's possible...<br><br>So, in general - networking peer to peer is not any slower than the same two computers using a hub?<br><br>I'll check out the MTUspeed utility you recommend. Thanks.
The protocols that you use can affect the speed. You will get different results if you use NETBUI vs IPX vs TCPIP.<br>The quality of the interconnecting cable can affect the speed. If you have a CAT5 cable then it should be good for 100Mb/s so it shouldn't affect speed results at the 10Mb/s level. The other thing that can appear to affect ethernet speed is your PC itself and the hard drive. In other words it may take 9 seconds to transfer a 50MB file to your PC using 100 Mb/s but by the time it gets through the NIC, routed onto the bus and deposited on the hard drive, you may find that the whole process takes 25 seconds. I know, because these are real world numbers done here where I work.<br><br>You can get around the hard drive problem by using the following batch file:<br> @echo off<br> set $test$=%1<br> if "%$test$%"=="" set $test$=c:\nul<br> :START<br> if exist "%$test$%" del "%$test$%" >nul<br> timethis copy test.zip %$test$% ¦ find "Elapsed"<br> goto START<br> :END<br><br>By the way, test.zip is a made up file that we set to exactly 50MB. timethis is an NT resource kit utility that displays the time to perform an operation.<br><br>By the way, it takes about 50-55 seconds to transfer that 50MB file from a server to a workstation with a 10Mb/s NIC.<br><br>Hope this helps a bit.<br><br> <p>Ian Cowie<br><a href=mailto:ianco@email.com>ianco@email.com</a><br><a href= > </a><br>"If you see something THIS big, with eight legs, coming your way, let me know. I have to kill it before it develops language skills." - Londo, Babylon 5 <br>
Anyhow, how can I help you, eh?
Anyhow, how can I help you, eh?
-
2
- #5
Ethernet should absolutely SMOKE serial line speeds.<br><br>You have a issue with the ethernet setup alright. I would say<br>check 2 things. I assume you are using a crossover cable<br>to hook the 2 machines together without a hub. If that is<br>true, try to set both cards to 10Mbit full duplex. Dont let<br>them 'auto' the speed or duplex setting. They may not be<br>detecting the other correctly, mostly due to no industry<br>standards for speed/duplex autodetection. Next, if you ARE<br>using a hub, then both cards should default to 10Mbit half<br>duplex, which would be correct. Also, are you using the <br>correct drivers for each card. Sometimes winblows uses a <br>driver it thinks is correct,but is generic or meant for<br>another card. Lastly, you might have a performance issue<br>with the ISA card but I highly dought it.<br>Try running some netstat commands durring the transfer to <br>see if you are getting send or receive errors, like this...<br><br>netstat -e 2<br><br>If errors show up, you have a problem with your ethernet<br>setup.<br><br>Leroy Harvey CCNA, CCDA, MCSE, MCNE
- Status