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Explain my crazy network speeds

T

thatbox

Senior member
I was transfering a CD image from one comp to another and watched the network speed graph. it hops from 4mbps to 60mbps. how come? and its supposed to be 100mbps, does anybody actually get that? heres a picture of the graph: http://members.cox.net/thatbox/NetworkSpeed.htm what kinds of things slow down a network? i use a linksys router, btw.
 
Theoretical speed is 100Mbps, actual speed with good connections and good network cards and hub/switch can be about 70 to 80Mbps. Lower quality network devices can see about 60Mbps. It's normal for the speed to dip on a second by second basis, the average throughput is what matters. You can download utilities that provide a better view of the performance of the network.

I'm assuming that the bridged 1394 connection was created by default by Windows and you don't actually use it, but if you did, you'd only see maybe 120Mbps throughput on it.
 
Oh yeah, the performance would also depend on what sort of device is on the other end, and how busy each machine is, since the CPU does have to handle the processing of the data.

I just did a test on my network. I got a stead 69Mbps to one machine, but a peak of only 52Mbps to another with long periods of zero transfer from another machine. There always seems to be an issue transferring to that one, even though it's a good system.
 
thanks, that was just what i needed. about my bridged connections though: you mean a theoretical firewire network could only go 120mbps? [actually, my firewire ports and a second nic are in the bridge, and i do use it for my xbconnect]. i thought that firewire actually was that blazing 400mbps.
 
Theoretically it's 400Mbps, but as with everything, you never get that much speed. I've only found one site that did any kind of performance testing with Firewire and different OSes: http://www.homenethelp.com/network/firewire.asp

The best performance they saw was 81Mbps under Win2k Pro on both machines, which had to be done using the UniBrain Firenet software since 2k doesn't support firewire networking natively. Using WinME on either end, the performance was awful, under 40Mbps. Supposedly the more clients you have, the better the overall performance -- I presume that the arbitration of the line is good so that no client ends up "stealing" too much bandwidth from another.

Of course, at 200Mbps, you're transferring 25MBps, which is close to the sustained throughput possible on many harddrives. But since the actual throughput to a single machine is only under 100Mbps, it's not much different from Fast Ethernet.
 
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