How Fast is fast enough?

[YaBaBom]

What transfer rate should I be expecting from a 100 Mbps connection on my local network?
I've got five computers running peer-to-peer--four run Win2000, one is on 98. All five are connected to a KTI Ethernet switch and say that they're running at 100 MBPS. So why does Norton system doctor only register 5 MBPS on average? The measurement makes sense with my rough time estimates of how long it takes to transfer about 700 mb of data. It may be off a little, but it's deffinitely not anywhere near 100 Mbps. Am I wrong in thinking that this is slow?

Could the KTI switch just not be keeping up?

Could there be some setting i need to change on my computers?

 

[obenton]

5 megabits would be slow, 5 megabytes wouldn't be bad at all.

 

[Xanathar]

5Megabytes is about normal for a half duplex link on unoptimised hardware. Or even a full duplex link on unoptimised hardware. Is this over IP, or netbeui? Are the machines all pentium 3s or higher? Does your disk subsystem support the transfer?

 

[YaBaBom]

I've got two Celeron 500's, P3-500, and AMD thunderbird 900 (I don't know why I said five computers before. I've got NetBeui, NWLink NetBios IPX/SPX, and of course TCP/IP installed, but I'm not really sure how to tell what the computers are really using. Any advise on this?

I am getting 5000 Kbytes per second, but if you would humor me and explain why this is so much lower than the 100 in the rating. Is that 100 Mbits per second?

How do I optimise the ethernet connection?

What do you mean by the disk subsystem? Three win2000 systems running NTFS, and WIN98 is on FAT32, but how does that work with the protocol?

 

[spidey07]

networks are measured in bits/second. B = bytes, b = bits. Fast ethernet is 100 Mb/sec. So your 5000 MB/sec is good.

To Xanthar's point. Most disk systems can't push much more than 10 MB/sec anyway unless you get into highend stuff like fiber channel and serious physicall disk speeds. Also, processer does matter, but 700 Mhz and above is plenty.

Bottom line, 5000 MB/sec is good.

edit - disk sub system is collection of physical disks, disk controller (scsi, ide, etc), I/O channel (pci bus, etc). If you really want to test your speed then pull the file from memory rather than disk i.e. file is already cached on server. Then you eliminate physical disk and controller limitations (often bottleneck of most systems)

 

[bex0rs]

Oddly enough, I've gotten > 10 MB/s (yes, megabytes) via FTP from a Win2k Pro box to an NT4 Server. But using the same setup I only get about 3.5 MB/s via Windows file sharing. Same hardware and everything. I suppose that there is more overhead involved with Windows file sharing, but if someone knows the real reason, tell me!

~bex0rs

 

[bex0rs]

And BTW, the hardware in the NT4 Server was a Cyrix MII-300 with 2 identical Maxtor 5400 rpm 8.4 gig drives in a Raid 0 configuration. Software was just IIS 3.0.

~bex0rs

 

[BigDady92]

rip out ipx/spx that will cause some lag in the system as it sends out repeated broadcasts. keep netbui if you want to talk to the machines over the local lan using network neighboorhood. If you can get away from that and just use ip's you could get rid of more overhead on your lan and rip out netbui and stick to pure ip.

 

[spidey07]

FTP server might be caching

Yes windows file sharing on IP has WAY too much overhead but still the best way to go unless you want to use netbios which can be faster.

 

[YaBaBom]

Alright, I definitely do need to have the computers talk to each other. They all run an identical program locally but share a set of database files on only one of them--The AMD 900. So, is there a way to knock out IPX and Netbeui, and still have the comps talking together securely? If so, how can I do this?

Also, what effect does the switch have on performance. Does anyone know anything about KTI switches, or perhaps even use one? It's just a small, five-port version, which is all I need, even after I get a cable connection (I hope!), but if upgrading to a bigger name would give the office a bit better response time over the network, I'd do it.