Directly connected gigabit slower than dialup

[chipfoxx]

All I want to do is connect two computers with a gigabit connection. Once I connect two comps with cat5e they connect and ping fine (~0.083ms). I know my laptop gigabit ports works because I use it at work on a gigabit LAN.

BUT

SAMBA, HTTP, FTP, and all other transfers run at <2kbps then time out.
If I connect a 10/100 port to a Gigabit port runs everything is fine at 100Mbps
The indicator lights on the lan ports turn orange when i connect gigabit to gigabit and green when its 10/100 to gigabit.

One exception is that if do a file transfer over from the XP Laptop to the Gentoo Desktop 1 i get a steady 2.0MB/s

I found nothing useful on google so I'm turing to you guys.

I've tried Desktop 1 - Desktop 2 with Straight cat5e and crossover cat 5e
Desktop 1 - Latop with crossover and straight cat5e
Desktop 2 - Latop with crossover and straight cat5e
and every combination i can think of and lots of different cables. I use the same cables everyday for 10/100 connections.

I got the same results running Gentoo linux and Windows so I doubt its the software...

Desktop 1:
DFI-LanParty Ultra-D
NForce 4 Chipset
1Gigabit NForce PHY onboard Lan Port
1Gigabit Marvell onboard Lan Port
Gentoo Linux and Windows x64

Desktop 2:
K8NHA-Grand
NForce 3 Chipset
1Gigabit NForce PHY onboard Lan Port
1 Realtek 10/100 PCI
Windows x64

Work Laptop:
Dell Latitude M60
Broadcom 570x Gigabit Integrated
Windows XP

 

[Cloud Strife]

What gigabit switch is this? Is your network icon reading 1000Mbps?

 

[chipfoxx]

These computers are directly connected.. that means there is no switch in between. The icon in windows says 1.0Gbps

 

[Cloud Strife]

Are you using crossover cable? Straight through cables will not work if you're connected two computers together.

 

[Madwand1]

Originally posted by: Cloud Strife
Are you using crossover cable? Straight through cables will not work if you're connected two computers together.

Wrong.

 

[Cloud Strife]

Originally posted by: Madwand1

Originally posted by: Cloud Strife
Are you using crossover cable? Straight through cables will not work if you're connected two computers together.

Wrong.

?

If your NICS have MDIX, it should auto switch between cross or straight through.

 

[Madwand1]

Originally posted by: chipfoxx
SAMBA, HTTP, FTP, and all other transfers run at <2kbps then time out.

Strange.. . you seem to have eliminated most of the normal candidates. On this, I'd suggest simplying the test cases to ensure that you did in fact try all the options you said you tried. Stick to just a known good pre-made cat5e cable for example, and two machines.

If the adapters aren't running full auto-negotiate, set them to that. If there are any non-default NIC parameters; change them back. If jumbo frames are set, disable them, etc. If any TCP/IP settings have been changed, change them back to default. Uninstall and re-install the hardware/drivers if needed to ensure this.

Try a pure networking benchmark such as iPerf. E.g.

Receiver: iperf -s
Sender: iperf -c target -l 60000 -f m -t 20 -i 5

If that's fast, then go onto looking at the drives.

If it's still bad, then perhaps run a brief capture using WireShark and see what it's reporting.

 

[chipfoxx]

Between the two desktops with the Nforce adapters:
NF4 is the client > NF3 Server:
------------------------------------------------------------
Client connecting to 192.168.0.1, TCP port 5001
TCP window size: 0.01 MByte (default)
------------------------------------------------------------
[864] local 192.168.0.72 port 1824 connected with 192.168.0.1 port 5001
[ ID] Interval Transfer Bandwidth
[864] 0.0- 5.0 sec 2.23 MBytes 3.74 Mbits/sec
[864] 5.0-10.0 sec 1.20 MBytes 2.02 Mbits/sec
[864] 10.0-15.0 sec 0.97 MBytes 1.63 Mbits/sec
[864] 15.0-20.0 sec 0.74 MBytes 1.25 Mbits/sec
[864] 0.0-28.4 sec 5.21 MBytes 1.54 Mbits/sec


NF3 is the client here > NF4 Server:
------------------------------------------------------------
Client connecting to 192.168.0.72, TCP port 5001
TCP window size: 0.01 MByte (default)
------------------------------------------------------------
[864] local 192.168.0.1 port 1187 connected with 192.168.0.72 port 5001
write failed: Connection reset by peer
read on server close failed: Connection reset by peer
[ ID] Interval Transfer Bandwidth
[864] 0.0-20.5 sec 1.66 MBytes 0.68 Mbits/sec

NF4 Client > laptop is server
------------------------------------------------------------
Client connecting to 192.168.0.1, TCP port 5001
TCP window size: 0.01 MByte (default)
------------------------------------------------------------
[864] local 192.168.0.72 port 1836 connected with 192.168.0.1 port 5001
[ ID] Interval Transfer Bandwidth
[864] 0.0- 5.0 sec 352 MBytes 591 Mbits/sec
[864] 5.0-10.0 sec 376 MBytes 631 Mbits/sec
[864] 10.0-15.0 sec 375 MBytes 630 Mbits/sec
[864] 15.0-20.0 sec 376 MBytes 630 Mbits/sec
[864] 0.0-20.0 sec 1480 MBytes 620 Mbits/sec


NF3 Client > laptop is server
C:\>iperf -c 192.168.0.1 -l 60000 -f m -i 5
------------------------------------------------------------
Client connecting to 192.168.0.1, TCP port 5001
TCP window size: 0.01 MByte (default)
------------------------------------------------------------
[864] local 192.168.0.77 port 1280 connected with 192.168.0.1 port 5001
[ ID] Interval Transfer Bandwidth
[864] 0.0- 5.0 sec 12.0 MBytes 20.1 Mbits/sec
[864] 5.0-10.0 sec 8.53 MBytes 14.3 Mbits/sec
[864] 0.0-10.8 sec 20.5 MBytes 15.9 Mbits/sec



I tried iperf just as you said between my NF4 desktop and the laptop. I'm getting around 509Mb/s. Is that decent for a gigabit direct connect?
SAMBA transfers run at around 2.8MB/s
I have a 74GB raptor. Read speeds look good... maybe my write speeds are bad?
HDtach says it writes at 18MB/s which seems slow for a raptor

hdparm -tT /dev/sda
/dev/sda:
Timing cached reads: 2656 MB in 2.00 seconds = 1326.94 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 204 MB in 3.02 seconds = 67.63 MB/sec

 

[Madwand1]

That's progress -- the networking problem seems to be with the Biostar/NF3.

I tried iperf just as you said between my NF4 desktop and the laptop. I'm getting around 509Mb/s. Is that decent for a gigabit direct connect?

I see 630 Mb/s above. 630 Mb/s is around 79 MB/s -- sometimes this is what you get, so this is not an unreasonable rate. 509 Mb/s is on the low side, but still workable. It's probably sufficient for the HD's, and there are bigger problem to deal with here than tweaking these higher.

BTW, the nVIDIA LAN port on the NF4 board should be better than the Marvell one -- once everything is working. Until it is, the Marvell might be a safer bet though probably at lower speed.

http://www.neoseeker.com/Articles/Hardware/Reviews/dfinf4ultralp/7.html

Are you running nVIDIA firewall? You should probably disable them if you are -- these have been problematic. Are you running the latest NF3 chipset drivers? Current MB BIOS? If not, you should try updating them. Are you doing any overclocking? If so, you should try disabling it for the duration of the testing / problem resolution.

I haven't tried a 754 NF3, but for my 939 NF3, the NIC Advanced setting "Optimize For" setting generally works better with "Throughput" than with "CPU" (however, this makes a relatively small difference; nothing like what you need). I've also seen some problems with checksum offloading on NF3 (though not correlated with performance) -- so I'd suggest disabling it on this board. These recommendations don't necessarily apply to the NF4 NIC.

Yes, 18 MB/s write speed is slow -- look into turning on write caching and checking low-level drive parameters. See what HD Tune reports.

 

[chipfoxx]

All thats on the NF3 is Windows, iperf, and the drivers. Windows firewall is disabled and I didn't install any of the extra NVIDIA utilities. I check for the newest NVIDIA chipset drivers everyday. I have reinstalled and uninstalled them over and over again to try to fix this. I have the latest bios but they havn't created an update in months.
Yeah obviously with the results from iperf there is something wrong with the NF3. There aren't any Advanced NIC type settings in my bios, just enable and disable NIC.

Thanks for suggesting these tools Madwand1.

 

[Madwand1]

The Advanced settings are in the network adapter properties -- Properties / Configure / Advanced. But if you just left them at default, they should work.. maybe not the fastest, but nowhere as slow as you report. You could still try disabling Checksum Offload.

As another option, you could give up on the NF3 onboard and add a cheap PCI NIC. An Intel Pro 1000 MT can be found for $21 in US. There are even cheaper NICs, but you might give up something in performance or CPU load.

 

[chipfoxx]

Ah ok. I thought you meant the Advanced NIC settings were in the bios. I don't see checksum offload in the bios or the driver... I guess its just defective hardware. I'll try a different power supply. A bad power supply might mess up an onboard NIC and still make things look ok.

I've sent this board back twice already... I'll think about getting a card unless I can find anything else that might fix this.