gigabit performance sucks!

[VirtualLarry]

I have two systems with onboard gigabit lan. I broke out the gigabit switch tonight and hooked them up, in order to do a file transfer of 155GB of data. But it's going slow, too slow.
In Task Manager, it is showing network utilization of the gbit link at 12-20%.

What can I do to speed up network transfers, I should be getting at least 50% utilization, shouldn't I?

One system had the NVidia network access manager (firewall) installed, but I uninstalled it and there was no change in performance.

 

[Fardringle]

12-20% of 1 gigabit speed is 120-200 megabits per second. The network is most likely waiting for your hard drives to read (from the source) and write (on the destination) the data you are transferring. Unless you have an ultra fast RAID array in both PCs, you're going to have a hard time ever saturating a gigabit network with just a single connection between two computers.

 

[Tarrant64]

Originally posted by: Fardringle
12-20% of 1 gigabit speed is 120-200 megabits per second. The network is most likely waiting for your hard drives to read (from the source) and write (on the destination) the data you are transferring. Unless you have an ultra fast RAID array in both PCs, you're going to have a hard time ever saturating a gigabit network with just a single connection between two computers.

:thumbsup:

 

[jlazzaro]

use something like iperf to determine exactly what your trasfer speeds are. like fardringle noted, your hard drives are most likely the limiting factor.

 

[TC10284]

Originally posted by: Fardringle
12-20% of 1 gigabit speed is 120-200 megabits per second. The network is most likely waiting for your hard drives to read (from the source) and write (on the destination) the data you are transferring. Unless you have an ultra fast RAID array in both PCs, you're going to have a hard time ever saturating a gigabit network with just a single connection between two computers.

Affirmative/yes! 12-20% is the best I can get. I think I've seen 25% at one time copying files over the network.

To see better speeds, you'd have to setup a RAM drive or something similar.

 

[Genx87]

On my GB network I will typically see 12-15% utilization when writing to my filer. When I pull from it 20-28%.

It is your disks that are holding you back.

 

[spidey07]

you can use FTP for speedier transfers. windows file sharing is inherently slow with a lot of protocol overhead.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Watching a DVD movie via RDP is also choppy. That doesn't involve the HD. So what gives?

 

[Goosemaster]

Originally posted by: spidey07
you can use FTP for speedier transfers. windows file sharing is inherently slow with a lot of protocol overhead.

freebsd's samba implrementation sucks..just wanted to throw that out there...

 

[Fardringle]

Originally posted by: VirtualLarry
Watching a DVD movie via RDP is also choppy. That doesn't involve the HD. So what gives?

Don't watch videos over RDP. RDP is designed to transmit incremental changes in the remote computer's display (such as mouse movements, text, etc) to your local machine, not full screen full motion video.

 

[Blain]

My Netgear WNR854T (gigabit edition) router, and two PCs (1 with a Raptor and the other with 2 x 250GB RAID 0), max out at about 40% copying.

 

[Crusty]

I don't know what kind of HDD's you think this guy has, but 12-15% seems a bit low to me. 120 - 200mbps = 15 - 25 megabytes/sec. I would think that 20% would be the low end of the range.

Check the cables you are using, and make sure to use factory made patch cables only. Homemade crimped cables are far too unreliable.

 

[Idontcare]

Using WinXP Pro with D-Link DGS-2208 I was able to hit 99% utilization of my 1GBs link transferring files to another computer. It was actually pretty awesome to watch and see GB's of data transfer literally in a few tens of seconds.

(I did nothing to optimize my cards/network. No jumbo frame activation or any of that, not manually set by me at least)

Just wanted to post and confirm that it can be done, I've seen it, and the hardware available to do it is pretty darn cheap. Crazy cheap.

 

[palladium]

maybe your onboard LAN uses a PCI bus ( shared amongst other PCI devices) instead of a PCIe one.

 

[JackMDS]

Assuming that all the components are OK.

Average transfer Speed between two computers using Giga cards and running a Client OS (Regular Windows) is 25-30MB/sec. (B=Byte).

Thus 155GB should take about 90 minutes.