Transfer speed across the network

[MustISO]

I have two machines with 10/100 PCI network cards going through a router. Transferring large files between them seems very slow. In general how long would it take to transfer six 1GB files? It's taken well over an hour and it's only halfway done. Both machines are running Windows 2000 Pro.

 

[John]

I took me 3 min to xfer 1.2GB on my network (BEFW11S4 wireless 4 port router w/ 3C905C nics), which would come out to roughly ~15min if I had done 6GB worth of data. What router do you have?

 

[dpopiz]

I've been wondering too if my network is really up to speed
running at the theoretical maximum speed of fast ethernet, your transfer would take less than 7 mins (12.5MB/sec)
I think the highest I've seen on my setup is about (5MB/sec)
however I have no idea what the typical real-world speed is

 

[MustISO]

John, I have an SMC Barricade. I was 99.9% sure it was going waaay too slow. Using Perfmon, I'm only getting 500k/s. That's pretty lame.

Some more info: They're in seperate workgroups if that matters. I'm using a UNC network connection to an administrative share (i.e. not mapping a drive).

 

[ScottMac]

Y'all should check your cables. The little SOHO routers whup right along, easily keeping up with Fast Ethernet.

If the cables are hand made (by you or some person you know that's not a cabling professional), then chances are (that'd be about an 80% chance, according to industry specs) that your cables are bad. Even store-bought pre-made cable can go bad with the right kind of abuse. Just because you get some data through, don't assume your cables are allowing max performance.

After the cables, it could be related to your hard drive speeds, the OS, amount of RAM, other background programs, cheap NIC, crummy / out-of-date / wrong drivers, slow chipset, slow application, etc. There are A LOT of things that can affect your throughput, but the SOHO router should be WAAAAAAAAAAAY down on the list, somewhere just above the SOHO switch. If one of the systems is a laptop, then you can automatically almost double the time; laptops are very slow compared to a similarly equipped desktop (the price you pay for portability and long (snicker) battery life).

BTW: being in separate workgroups would have no effect on the performance (at least after the session is established, if at all).

JM.02

Scott

 

[bbqweed]

try disabling any additional firewall or virus software....

when running behind a router...these programs tend to slow things down. ...also check for any ISP software....they slow things down to...especially anything like "connection manager" software or "broadjump client foundation" software....

also check for IRQ conflicts...

 

[MustISO]

I'll try different cables and see what happens. I got the latest NIC drivers from 3COM so I'll try those as well. I have disabled all virus scanning and the only firewall is the one in the router. I may try swapping out the NIC's to see if that changes anything. I don't think the hard drives are the problem the activity light on the drive that is recieving the data hardly blinks. I'm not running any ISP software or any application in the background. I have two other machines I can try testing in different combinations to narrow down where the problem is.

The machines are:
P3 800 with 512MB PC133
240GB of 7200RPM drives

P4 2.0Ghz with 512 PC2700 DDR
60GB Ultra/100 drive

 

[andrewjm]

Is there a program that you can run to detect the speed of a local network? I have 4 computers and I would like to run a speed test to see the speeds, because it takes about 2min to transfer 1GB but I want to know exact numbers.

 

[JackMDS]

For reliable transfer?s measure, and Network?s info:


A FREE Utility for Network Troubleshooting from NetIQ!).

 

[MustISO]

Andrewjm, I just use Perfmon (Free with Windows ). It gives a good amount of information but probably not as slick as that Utility. Damn, now I want to go home and try some new cables, new cards etc. This is just driving me crazy.

 

[MustISO]

/me hangs his head in shame...

A reboot is your friend, never underestimate the power of restarting. Everything is speedy as hell now. Well only 10Mb/s but still.

 

[WarmAndSCSI]

That seems a bit slow.... I can usually get about 1 GB/min on my 100Base-TX Full Duplex LAN.

 

[Mucman]

TheUnhappyCamper - umm 1GB/min is faster than a 100Mbit network! If you ran a network at a theoritical max (which won't happen because of protocol overhead etc...) you can only reach 750MB/min

 

[Abzstrak]

That seems a bit slow.... I can usually get about 1 GB/min on my 100Base-TX Full Duplex LAN.

LMAO, I dont think so....