Look at your disks. If you run a gui on your ubuntu box, use gkrellm with a view per-disk. You can usually tell easily with it when something is gnawing on a disk and chugging down the system. SSD's for personal computing made this problem go away largely for me. Using gkrellim, you can see network i/o, proc, cpu, disks, and sorta memory for what is hoarding. Htop is nice too for seeing what is chugging you down. GigE speed is a bit illusory, as it takes a lot of disk/cpu to stream data at a sustained rate like that. Iperf tells you realistically what your system can support across the network, using it on both lin/win to see. It sends bits from memory, generating them faster than reading any data and sending it via protocol, usually getting 92%-ish of the pipe if your network supports it (in your case, nics don't suck). Protocols vary widely for me. NFS is faster than CIFS by at least 40%, ftp is fast when the disk being written to isn't io-locked. Use the sysstat package and iostat to monitor disks. Tweaking with schedulers, tcp_rmem/wmem, qos, etc helps more. Windoze use perfmon to watch disk i/o and everything else. Make sure you're not getting errors on your interface as well, walmart isn't exactly the your friendly neighborhood performance networking shop. I get bunk cables from frys occasionally still in a pinch when I bother there. -mb On 02/18/2012 11:16 PM, Eric Cope wrote: > protocol matters too. SMB is very slow. FTP seems to be the best for me. > > > On Sat, Feb 18, 2012 at 9:43 PM, Mike Bydalek wrote: >> What's the data you're transferring? Lots of small files (ie >> pictures) or large files (ISOs, MP4s, etc)? >> >> What's the OS of each side? >> >> The problem could be your cable as 1000BASE-T was made to work with >> Cat5, but Cat5 wasn't designed to work for 1000BASE-T. >> >> Regards, >> Mike >> >> On Feb 18, 2012, at 9:36 PM, Derek Trotter wrote: >> >>> I have two computers sitting right next to each other connected via a 6 foot long piece of cat 5 I picked up at Wally World one day. They both have gigabit ethernet cards in them. Both machines recognize the connection as a gigabit connection, but I'm lucky to get half that. Most of the time I get around 40%. >>> >>> Is there anything I can do to get the connection to work a bit faster? >>> >>> thanks >>> --------------------------------------------------- >>> PLUG-discuss mailing list - PLUG-discuss@lists.plug.phoenix.az.us >>> To subscribe, unsubscribe, or to change your mail settings: >>> http://lists.PLUG.phoenix.az.us/mailman/listinfo/plug-discuss >> --------------------------------------------------- >> PLUG-discuss mailing list - PLUG-discuss@lists.plug.phoenix.az.us >> To subscribe, unsubscribe, or to change your mail settings: >> http://lists.PLUG.phoenix.az.us/mailman/listinfo/plug-discuss > --------------------------------------------------- > PLUG-discuss mailing list - PLUG-discuss@lists.plug.phoenix.az.us > To subscribe, unsubscribe, or to change your mail settings: > http://lists.PLUG.phoenix.az.us/mailman/listinfo/plug-discuss --------------------------------------------------- PLUG-discuss mailing list - PLUG-discuss@lists.plug.phoenix.az.us To subscribe, unsubscribe, or to change your mail settings: http://lists.PLUG.phoenix.az.us/mailman/listinfo/plug-discuss