Am I completely off the deep end?? What am I doing wrong?

[emfiend]

Ok. I think this belongs in the OS forum because from what I could find online, this appers to happen mostly with networks where only a few of the systems have Vista.

I'm experimenting with setting up a home LAN with the two machines in my sig. My intent is to later replace the secondary with a full-fledged HTPC. Router is a DGL-4300.

Here's how I set it up:
1. Set workgroup names the same for both machines
2. Set accounts and passwords same for both machines
3. Enable Network Discovery, File sharing, Password protected sharing, and Media sharing on both machines.
4. No soft firewalls on either machine.
5. No strange router setting on DGL-4300 (This is the part I'm least sure about since I didn't do much with changing settings for LAN routing. In fact, I don't think there are any settings for LAN firewalls. Is it even safe to trust the firewall in the router?)
6A. Tried marking key folders on both machines for share-enabled
6B. Tried mapping network drives on both machines AND enabling sharing.

Here's what I'm getting:
1. I can see both shared files AND/OR mapped network drives
2. I can go into directories and generally look around from within one machine into the other.

Here's my problem:
1. File transfers are TOO DAMN SLOW!!! :|
2. Moving/copying files from XP to Vista goes at about 5.0 MB/s
3. Moving/copying files from Vista to XP goes at about 50-70 KB/s!!

So the p4 system has a 10/100 controller so if that's the bottleneck then 5.0*8 = 40 Mb/s seems reasonable. (or is it?) But how can transfer the other way be so slow??? Changing settings doesn't seem to do anything other than maybe a few percent change (5%-10%) in the slow (vista-to-xp) rates.

I've tried all the suggestions from on-line (either turned on or off autotuninglevel, remote differential compression, public sharing, mapping network drives, MS hotfixe 931770)

What am I doing wrong? Please help...

 

[emfiend]

Anyone? I'm not a fanboy or a critic. I just want to get it working before the Thanksgiving holidays next week. I'm no means knowledgable of things at this level. I'm really hurting for some advice.

BTW. I have 2 Samsung SATA 3.0Gb/s drives in the C2Q system and a bunch of ATA100 drives in the secondary machine. My Vistax64 version is home premium.

I've also tried disabling IPv6 among other things. Still very slow. the DGL-4300 is gigabit capable wireless router but my problems are with two wired computers connected through the lan ports. All drivers up to date. All patches/hotfixes installed.

The fact that I can get good throughput going from XP to Vista seems to indicate that the hardware is setup correctly. Is there some sort of asynchronous network setting?

Other threads have hinted at this as if its a well known problem (so I'm a bit clueless) but don't really provide much that I haven't alreayd tried....

Kind of related flame thread

Tried all of these things to no avail

This was back in June.

Trying this still didn't work.

 

[beatle]

Can you try a crossover between the two machines or a different hub/switch? Do you have a spare NIC to try? Can you transfer files to a 3rd computer to test?

I had the integrated NIC go bad on my motherboard years ago and file xfers suffered greatly. I put in a PCI NIC and all was well again.

 

[emfiend]

Thanks for the advice. I was hoping to avoid getting a new NIC. It seems if transfers both out and in were slow this would make sense. But seems it might be worth it anyway just to have an improvement over the 10/100 thats in the XP machine.

 

[TastesLikeChicken]

Do you use another firewall besides the one in Vista? If so, disable it and see if that solves the problem. 3rd-party firewalls have created issues with Vista network transfers.

 

[ZappDogg]

Do you have the Performance and Reliability patch installed yet? That's the main thing to check for, I went from ~5 to ~35-40 on my file transfer speed.

I'm pretty sure this is the one.

 

[emfiend]

TastesLikeChicken,
Yep. turned off both firewalls, antivirus, etc. The slower route (copying from Vista-to-XP) seems capped around 70KB/s no matter what I try.

ZappDogg,
I'm pretty sure I have every patch installed. I'll doublecheck when I get home tonight.


...
I guess the only reassuring thing is that this is a common problem that MS knows about and is addressing in SP1. And with everything I've tried in the last few days, I'm pretty sure I broke something else while trying to fix this....

 

[TastesLikeChicken]

Maybe this is your problem?

http://robgarrett.com/cs/blogs...low-file-copy-fix.aspx

For those of you using the Realtek RTL8139/810x Family Fast Ethernet NIC, and if your are having massive internet download slowdown and file transfer slowdown in Windows VISTA, your problems are over: One needs to update the driver. Basically very simple, it just took me two days to figure it out and find the right driver. All the blogs and websites talk about disabling this, and tweeking that. I tried all that crap and it didn't work. No one suggested to install the following driver at least that I could find and if the folks who are trying to solve this problem are like me, I know, I know you want to throw your computer out the window, and you are sitting there saying, Why Why Why didn't I wait to do this upgrade. Just Google ---> "WinVista_6104_NIC_8139-20070620.zip" and you will find it. Install the new driver and just like magic your internet speeds and file transfer speeds should once again be smokin, of course your milage will vary dependent on the speed of your ISP and network. Whew!

Worth a shot, since your m/b does have the Realtek LAN chip.

 

[emfiend]

Tried that too. My current driver version is more recent than the one on that page. It's dated 11/08/2007. And the driver version is also higher (6.108).

I double checked to make sure I have every single patch/update installed and each time I try to install by hand it tells me my computer doesn't need it (because its already there). Also doublechecked driver versions...

Waiting now on a new NIC to see if that resolves it.

 

[emfiend]

Just some FUD to lighten my day or maybe I'm just venting from frustration...

I'm beginning to believe that this problem has something to do with DRM in vista. The only large files that I can copy are media files and home movies. SO with vista being known for its drm elements, I wonder if its contributing in some way to crapping up the lan transfers. Maybe it recognizes the media files and restricts their movement around. I have no proof or evidence of this connection nor do I care to test it out after the constant reboots trying to figure it out till now (I'm not an OC'er so I'm not used to rebooting ad nauseum).

Was really hoping to have the baby's videos on the big TV for the grandparents over thanksgiving without having to carry the 70lb main computer back and forth from upstairs. :|

 

[Madwand1]

Using a network benchmark might help isolate the problem.

E.g. using iperf version 1.7:

server: iperf -s
client: iperf -c server -l 64k -t 15 -i 3 -r

Where server is the name or IP of the remote computer.

I just set up a couple of relatively clean machines, one running Vista x64 and another XP Pro, reduced the XP's NIC to 100/half, and tested transfers. Both iperf and actual file transfers were "fine" at around 8-10 MB/s.

(I used 100/half because sometimes there are issues with forcing full duplex. 100/full was also OK in this case in the end.)

 

[emfiend]

Thanks for the help. I'm going to re-try this tonight with iperf. I have it on autodetect now and tried 100/full before with iperf but didn't try 100/half yet. Its definitely worth a shot.

 

[kenl77]

hey i have the same mobo infact the v2.1
but when transferring files between partition or hard disk i seem to either have very slow transfer rate or it just doesnt appear to do it.
i'll try reinstall my os again... and see but one sata drive that i set to 300mb/sec transfer rate has a partition on it when when transferring file from the very beginning of a fresh install of xp sp2 had already had issue transferring files.

im wondering if it is a issue with the mobo

 

[Nothinman]

'm beginning to believe that this problem has something to do with DRM in vista. The only large files that I can copy are media files and home movies. SO with vista being known for its drm elements, I wonder if its contributing in some way to crapping up the lan transfers. Maybe it recognizes the media files and restricts their movement around. I have no proof or evidence of this connection nor do I care to test it out after the constant reboots trying to figure it out till now (I'm not an OC'er so I'm not used to rebooting ad nauseum).

Uh, no. The DRM in Vista only affects files that are encrypted by the copyright owner and even then it only affects playback of those files.

 

[emfiend]

Well, the new RC SP1 seems to have helped. The remainder of the poor file transfer performance I think I can blame on a combination of my router/HD's/cabling/firewalls.

With everything set the way I want for day-to-day use I max out at 200 Mbps.

With firewalls disabled iperf shows 480 Mbps (with the computers connected through cat5e cabling that may span about 50 ft).

With the computers connected through a span of 6 ft of cat5e I get iperf values of 850-900 Mbps.

All of these are much better than the 70kBps I was getting before. I'm taking what I can get.

 

[emfiend]

Originally posted by: Nothinman

'm beginning to believe that this problem has something to do with DRM in vista. The only large files that I can copy are media files and home movies. SO with vista being known for its drm elements, I wonder if its contributing in some way to crapping up the lan transfers. Maybe it recognizes the media files and restricts their movement around. I have no proof or evidence of this connection nor do I care to test it out after the constant reboots trying to figure it out till now (I'm not an OC'er so I'm not used to rebooting ad nauseum).

Uh, no. The DRM in Vista only affects files that are encrypted by the copyright owner and even then it only affects playback of those files.

In case it wasn't obvious, I was kidding about DRM...

 

[Nothinman]

In case it wasn't obvious, I was kidding about DRM...

Sorry, it wasn't obvious. Mostly because there's a lot of people out there that actually believe that kind of stuff.

 

[VirtualLarry]

As far as I know, slow network file-transfers between XP and Vista machines are a new Vista "feature".
I don't know if MS even has this on their radar to fix, probably they suggest to upgrade all machines to Vista, then all is well again.

Larry, you came into a thread after the OP solved the problem and continue to troll.
You've gotten two mod warnings today, this is your third. See you in a week.
Anandtech Moderator - bsobel

 

[bsobel]

Originally posted by: VirtualLarry
As far as I know, slow network file-transfers between XP and Vista machines are a new Vista "feature".
I don't know if MS even has this on their radar to fix, probably they suggest to upgrade all machines to Vista, then all is well again.

OP, did you have media player running during the copies? SP1 fixes the known aggressive streaming reservations of Media Player which slows down network transfers.

 

[emfiend]

Originally posted by: bsobel

OP, did you have media player running during the copies? SP1 fixes the known aggressive streaming reservations of Media Player which slows down network transfers.

I think I made sure to initiate the copy from cold-booted machines. Over the many times I tried to copy over the network, I think I tried running media player only once or twice.

I thought the fix was in the way the tcp stack was being optimized in vista but I'm not really an expert to know *shrug*

 

[bsobel]

Originally posted by: emfiend

Originally posted by: bsobel

OP, did you have media player running during the copies? SP1 fixes the known aggressive streaming reservations of Media Player which slows down network transfers.

I think I made sure to initiate the copy from cold-booted machines. Over the many times I tried to copy over the network, I think I tried running media player only once or twice.

I thought the fix was in the way the tcp stack was being optimized in vista but I'm not really an expert to know *shrug*

The media player bug was it capping network IO at a certain point to ensure streams played smoothly, it worked at 10mbit networks, kinda at 100, and they just blew it at gigE. This is fixed in SP1.

Bill

 

[ViRGE]

Originally posted by: bsobel

Originally posted by: emfiend

Originally posted by: bsobel

OP, did you have media player running during the copies? SP1 fixes the known aggressive streaming reservations of Media Player which slows down network transfers.

I think I made sure to initiate the copy from cold-booted machines. Over the many times I tried to copy over the network, I think I tried running media player only once or twice.

I thought the fix was in the way the tcp stack was being optimized in vista but I'm not really an expert to know *shrug*

The media player bug was it capping network IO at a certain point to ensure streams played smoothly, it worked at 10mbit networks, kinda at 100, and they just blew it at gigE. This is fixed in SP1.

Bill

It wasn't a bug per-say, it was a poor design decision. The code was doing exactly was it was supposed to be doing (limiting the flow of packets so that the audio subsystem would reliably execute every 10ms).

 

[bsobel]

It wasn't a bug per-say, it was a poor design decision. The code was doing exactly was it was supposed to be doing (limiting the flow of packets so that the audio subsystem would reliably execute every 10ms).

It's a bug, the reason for the bug was a poor design decision. It should have neve shipped without proper testing at gigE. But you can argue that wasn't a true bug. However, mixed in the issue was a true bug (From Mark's Blog): "Further, there?s an unfortunate bug in the NDIS throttling code that magnifies throttling if you have multiple NICs. If you have a system with both wireless and wired adapters, for instance, NDIS will process at most 8000 packets per second, and with three adapters it will process a maximum of 6000 packets per second. 6000 packets per second equals 9MB/s, a limit that?s visible even on 100Mb networks."

So, if MS is calling it a bug, it's probably safe for us to do so as well