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Help me diagnose poor network performance.

Jeff7181

Jeff7181

Lifer
I have a pretty basic home LAN set up. Linksys BEFW11S4 wireless router with 4 port switch. Connected to port 1 is my main rig (I'll call this PC1), an Athlon 64 with nForce4 SLI motherboard. Connected to port 2 is my secondary rig (I'll call this PC2), an Athlon XP 2100 with KT133 motherboard that I use mostly as a file server. I have a 160 GB hard drive that I have a bunch of junk stored on so I have access to it from any computer. Then I have my laptop which I mainly use the wireless connection for (I'll call this PC3).

Here's the problem...

PC1 has very poor networking performance when copying a file from PC2 to PC1.
PC3 has normal networking performance when copying a file from PC2 to PC3.

Here's the kicker...

When downloading from the Internet, PC1 is capable of faster speeds than when data is being transferred across my LAN. 😕 The only thing I can think of that's different about PC1 is I have a drive on PC2 mapped to PC1 for quick access.

Suggestions?
 
make sure the speed and duplex of all cards are set to auto-negotiate (control panel for your network card). Forcing the cards to 100/full can yieled poor performance like you're seeing.
 
heh, cool.

It's funny, people thing forcing their card helps performance, when in reality it makes it perform like poo-poo. It's called a duplex mismatch, and a leading cause of bad ethernet performance.

second only to homemade patch cables.
 
This is really a more common problem than we'd think, and due to poor auto negotiation standards. The biggest problem occurs when it comes to hooking computers directly to Cable/DSL modems, which tend to have the most limited media detection skills.

I'm a bit surprised though that a modern router with a switch built in is having this problem. Switches are typically the 'smartest' when it comes to getting it right.

Otherwise, I prefer to manually set my cards to 100/half and only use full duplex if I have fast boxes on the entire network.
 
My computer gets wired access from a Linksys WRT54G router. In the network card properties I set "Link Speed & Duplex" to "Auto-negotiate 1000Mbps." I thought it would improve performance like it did for the OP but as soon as I did it, it says network cable unplugged! Was I not supposed to do that with a router? What should I do?
 
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