gigabit ethernet question

[Michael Butash]

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<mike.bydalek at gmail.com>  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<expat.arizonan at gmail.com>  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 at 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 at 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 at lists.plug.phoenix.az.us
> To subscribe, unsubscribe, or to change your mail settings:
> http://lists.PLUG.phoenix.az.us/mailman/listinfo/plug-discuss