I bought a Linksys WRT310N wireless N Gigabit router, 2 Linksys Gigabit 5 
port switches, 1 Linksys 8 port Gigabit switch, 2 PCMIA to Ethernet Gigabit 
ethernet cards by Belkin and 3 internal el cheapo 1 Gigabit full duplex 
athernet cards and replaced all of my 10/100 stuff on my small network.

After getting everything set up, I expected throughput (copying a file) 
speeds to be around 60MB/s...but (using Racoonworks free speed tester from ) 
I am getting readings of 7.5MB/s.

What could be causing such a slow response in copying a file on my new 
Gigabit network?

I made sure that nothing was running on either system and no major network 
traffic was happeing that I am aware of.

Thanks for your help!

jim 

On 2008-04-09 01:46:47 -0400, "jim" <jim@home.net> said:

> I bought a Linksys WRT310N wireless N Gigabit router, 2 Linksys Gigabit 5
> port switches, 1 Linksys 8 port Gigabit switch, 2 PCMIA to Ethernet Gigabit
> ethernet cards by Belkin and 3 internal el cheapo 1 Gigabit full duplex
> athernet cards and replaced all of my 10/100 stuff on my small network.

Are the copies "local" (same network), not from a wireless to a wired 
host, and between alike operating systems? Wireless signal degradation 
could be it, lousy network card / driver performance, and finally 
TCP/IP misbehaving between your machines, even a bad cable.

If these are Windows machines that are under your administrative 
control, etc. and aren't Vista or W2K3, you may be able to tweak a 
parameter in the registry that enables something called RFC1323 TCP 
Window Scaling. I'll spare the long technical explanation, suffice to 
say it will allow your machines to talk to other hosts more efficiently 
by reducing the number of TCP ACKs required to send large quantities of 
data.

Of course, backup your registry, etc., registry tweaking is not for the 
faint-of-heart, if the registry is fouled, your system may not boot, 
etc. There are some commercially sold utilities that can tweak this for 
you.

/dmfh

-- 

 __| |_ __  / _| |_     01100100 01101101
/ _` | '  \|  _| ' \    01100110 01101000
\__,_|_|_|_|_| |_||_|    dmfh(-2)dmfh.cx

jim wrote:
> I bought a Linksys WRT310N wireless N Gigabit router, 2 Linksys Gigabit 5 
> port switches, 1 Linksys 8 port Gigabit switch, 2 PCMIA to Ethernet Gigabit 
> ethernet cards by Belkin and 3 internal el cheapo 1 Gigabit full duplex 
> athernet cards and replaced all of my 10/100 stuff on my small network.
> 
> After getting everything set up, I expected throughput (copying a file) 
> speeds to be around 60MB/s...but (using Racoonworks free speed tester from ) 
> I am getting readings of 7.5MB/s.
> 
> What could be causing such a slow response in copying a file on my new 
> Gigabit network?
> 
> I made sure that nothing was running on either system and no major network 
> traffic was happeing that I am aware of.
> 
> Thanks for your help!
> 
> jim 
> 
> 

Make sure you are properly negotiating 1000/full duplex on the NICs. You 
can force it (if it's a decent NIC) from the properties in device 
manager. If the switches are managed, do the same at that end. Make sure 
you are using cat6 cable for anything over about 100' (30 m), CAT5e for 
anything shorter, all 8 wires are properly connected and paired, 
end-to-end. Wall jacks wired correctly with approved cat6 jacks, patch 
panel, etc.

The fastest I've ever seen Windows SMB transfer files is around 50MB/s, 
doesn't mean it won't go faster, but that is my observation. Vista is 
rumored to be even slower (and the "fix" improved it, but did not make 
it as fast as pre-Vista OS's). Haven't tried Vista myself. Try an ftp 
transfer to see if SMB is slowing you down.

When we went to gig on our LAN, speed improved by a factor of about 3. 
My experience is that bandwidth (on a small 100Mb network) is rarely, if 
ever, the problem. I'll just about guarantee you that any 100Mb switch 
costing over $125 will provide 95+Mbps of throughput. Until you've 
reached that saturation, upping the network hardware bandwidth will have 
little effect.

Kurt

"Digital Mercenary For Honor" <dmfh(-2-)nospamr3m0v3th1s.dmfh.cx> wrote in 
message news:dn9uc5-ka2.ln1@news.dmfh.cx...
> On 2008-04-09 01:46:47 -0400, "jim" <jim@home.net> said:
>
>> I bought a Linksys WRT310N wireless N Gigabit router, 2 Linksys Gigabit 5
>> port switches, 1 Linksys 8 port Gigabit switch, 2 PCMIA to Ethernet 
>> Gigabit
>> ethernet cards by Belkin and 3 internal el cheapo 1 Gigabit full duplex
>> athernet cards and replaced all of my 10/100 stuff on my small network.
>
> Are the copies "local" (same network), not from a wireless to a wired 
> host, and between alike operating systems? Wireless signal degradation 
> could be it, lousy network card / driver performance, and finally TCP/IP 
> misbehaving between your machines, even a bad cable.

Both XP Pro PCs are wired to the same network (just a few of XP machines in 
the same workgroup).  There is no real server on this network.

> If these are Windows machines that are under your administrative control, 
> etc. and aren't Vista or W2K3, you may be able to tweak a parameter in the 
> registry that enables something called RFC1323 TCP Window Scaling. I'll 
> spare the long technical explanation, suffice to say it will allow your 
> machines to talk to other hosts more efficiently by reducing the number of 
> TCP ACKs required to send large quantities of data.

I'll test this tonite and let you know what happened.

Thanks!

jim