home network question:

[Insidious]

So I transfer a (very) large file from one computer to the other over the local (10/100) network.

It seems to take a 'long' time. (45 seconds)

I look at task manager and it shows link speed at 100mbps, but %utilization is hovering between 1% and 2%

Is this normal? Do I have something wrong?

file and printer sharing for Microsoft networks set to use NWLink IPX/SPX/NetBIOS compatible transport protocol

Client for Microsoft Networks Set for the same and TCP/IP as well

QoS not installed

 

[Insidious]

Yeah, I know it's a trivial question, but I am curious.

Can ya help? Is this normal?

er, Bump

 

[cipher00]

Doesn't sound normal, but it could be due to a host of things. Such as:
* are both NICs running at 100
* swap NICs, cables one at a time to see if something may be malfunctioning
other stuff I can't think of immediately...

Does this happen all the time, or just on your very large file?

 

[Mucman]

What are the specs of each machine?

I have and FTP server (P150) on my network,and I only get about 20Mbit from it. If I run an FTP server on my P3 1GHz I get about 80Mbit.

The client machine is a PIII 450 with 128M of RAM (win98). When FTP'ing from the 1GHz machine the transfer peaks then drops (700M file being transfered). So the
client machine can't handled the speed because the memory buffers become full and it must commit to disk. That's when the valleys occur.

Also, testing via Windows File Sharing isn't too good. There is a lot of protocol overhead that slows down the transfer. To get the best idea on how fast the network
is, use FTP.

 

[Insidious]

Thanks folks.

I don't have any sign of anything broken or malfunctioning. With only 2 machines and identical hardware in each, swapping doesn't make too much sense to me. I did try transfering in both directions with the same results. These comps. are pretty fast. (Athy 1.4 @ 1.55 see MyRigThingy)

I'm guessing you are right with the suggestion that it is just Windows file sharing overhead. The performance monitor graph is flat during the transfer (no peaks or valleys)

I do see that the HD light is on continuously on the sending machine and blinks with a duty cycle of something like 10% (on) on the receiving machine.

Fortunately I don't do any work here requiring frequent file sharing of large files and waiting 30 seconds or so for 200+ MB to transfer is no big deal. I was just curious if it is normal.


I don't know how to FTP between the computers, if it is easy, could you describe it so I can give that a try?

Thanks for your time!

-Sid

 

[Mucman]

Hmm... the servers I used for my test bench were both FreeBSD (better TCP/IP code than Windows). I used the basic ftpd program that FreeBSD comes with (2 seconds to setup), and used SmartFTP on the win98 machine so I could have the funky network traffic graph.

I've always found Windows File Sharing to be very slow (compared to FTP). A popular Windows FTP program is Serv-U. Unfortunately
the only Windows FTP software I am familiar with is IIS, but that are numerous threads in the OS forum on how to set it up.