Network woes

Tripitz

Member
May 3, 2001
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I am experiencing network performance problems between 2 pc's. I'm truly stuck as to how to proceed.

The PC's are connected to each other via a Netgear FS605 switch (10/100 auto sensing).

One PC has an intel Pro lan 100/S card in it which I have used without problems for 1 year now. The other pc is the built in broadcom nic on my Asus P4 PE. Both nics have the latest drivers. I have set both cards to 100mbit performance at Full Duplex. One PC is running windows 2000 and the other is running Win XP. Both computers see each other immediately for drive sharing/file sharing purposes. They both have fixed IP's (ie, internal lan ids, .2 .3)

The problem is that the performance is spotty. It can take 30-40 seconds to transfer a 4 mb file, which is very slow for such a file size. I have benched the performance of the pc's connected to each other via Sandra and it reports the proper bandwidth. Windows XP's network usage monitor has shown some interesting aspects:

When transferring a file from one to the other, the immediate network usage jumps to 50-75% range for 5-10 seconds, where it then drops to 0-5% for another 10+ seconds. After that time period, it jums back up to 75% usage. This corresponds perfectly with what windows file manager is showing when transferring files. It starts off quickly, and then just stalls before continuing.

This horrible performance is driving me nuts as I plan on placing one of the pc's in a remote part of the house without a monitor and manage it via pc anywhere, but the performance of it is terrible.

Since I am new to Win XP, is there an authentication or verification procedure that is taking place that could cause this performance problem?

I have also done a netstat -es test and I received 0 errors. I am only running TCPIP protocols on both computers. File and printer sharing is natural installed.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

 

TheGrandHooHa

Senior member
Jun 28, 2001
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I am having a very similar problem ... performance is very spotty, only both of my computers are using Windows XP (one is on XP Home, the other is on XP Professional).
 

Tripitz

Member
May 3, 2001
50
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0
Originally posted by: TheGrandHooHa
I am having a very similar problem ... performance is very spotty, only both of my computers are using Windows XP (one is on XP Home, the other is on XP Professional).

Have you been able to improve the performance at all? This is driving me nuts as I can't tell if this is a hardware or software issue.
 

TheGrandHooHa

Senior member
Jun 28, 2001
408
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I haven't been able to improve performance. I've just been dealing with it ... luckily, most of the files I send are small, but I also back up my hard drive weekly to a network drive attached to another XP computer, and that backup takes FOREVER due to the poor performance... so I know what you feel like, it's driving me nuts too.

Perhaps someone here can shed some light on this?