Slow internal network speeds...

[AndyD]

I was pretty certain I started a thread for this but I can't seem to find it. Anyway, I'm having a tough time understanding why my internal network speeds are not consistent and not at gigabit speeds. I checked that the nics on both ends are set to 1 gbs and the switch / router between the devices are all 1 gbs capable. Why would I sometimes get 25 mb/s and other times 80 mb/s?

[Xahid]

80 MB/s ?

I don't think so, I got Maximum 25 MB/s in Giga Netowrk & 12 MB/s in 100 Mb/s Network.

& that's how it works ...

[+InsaneNutter MVC]

Are you copy files to / from the same devices when you notice a difference in speed? I find larger files will transfer a lot quicker than loads of smaller files.

Also copying to an IDE hard drive from an IDE hard drive would likely be a lot slower than copying from a SATA3 drive to a SATA3 drive.

80 MB/s ?

I don't think so, I got Maximum 25 MB/s in Giga Netowrk & 12 MB/s in 100 Mb/s Network.

& that's how it works ...

You probably have poor hard drive's then, I can easily exceed 80 MB/s across my home network.

[AndyD]

Good point. I probably have mostly SATA 2 drives but I will have to check when I'm back at home

[+BudMan MVC]

so you stated mb (megabits) are you talking MBytes?

25MBytes is clearly on a gig network, now is it great performance - no.. But its way over what is possible on a 100mbit network. As stated there are more variables that come into play than just your network speed.

But I would also check to see what your getting with wirespeed, take the HDD out of the equation. Use iperf or netio to do a test of what speeds your seeing on the wire. I would hope your seeing in the 800mbps range -- but might be as low as 300, etc. Depends on your nics, depends on your settings, etc.

When moving large files I normally see 50 to 90 MBytes per second.

[AndyD]

Ok I'll give it a try later. My speeds are generally all over the place but range from 20 to 85 MBytes

[Roger H. Veteran]

Sounds like cache on HDDs or something not being able to keep up.

Then again on my 1 Gbps network (Linksys E4200v1 router/switch) I can push 90-100MB/s straight (then again my laptop has a SSD to my NAS which are big 2TB Drives). At work from my machine (standard Office desktop) to the Server (SAS RAID 10 Drives) I get about 50-60MB/s off a WD 250GB 7200RPM HDD.

So I guess it depends on defragmentation of the file you are copying as well as the head moves to get all the pieces.

[Xahid]

Are you copy files to / from the same devices when you notice a difference in speed? I find larger files will transfer a lot quicker than loads of smaller files.

Also copying to an IDE hard drive from an IDE hard drive would likely be a lot slower than copying from a SATA3 drive to a SATA3 drive.

You probably have poor hard drive's then, I can easily exceed 80 MB/s across my home network.

I have SATA Drive, which is gives me 80 to 150 MB/s speed when transferring from one partition to other. but on the Giga network just 25MB/s

[+InsaneNutter MVC]

I have SATA Drive, which is gives me 80 to 150 MB/s speed when transferring from one partition to other. but on the Giga network just 25MB/s

Cant honestly say why you speeds are so low, I have an Asus RT-N16 gigabit router running the Tomato firmware, with 4x Netgear gigabit switches connected to each port on the router which reside in various rooms of the house.

Nothing really fancy, however i have always been happy with the file transfer speeds on my home network.

[remixedcat]

any other network activity that could impact it?

[trek]

Make sure, if your switches support it, Jumbo frames are enabled. From my ESX host hosting media to my PC is over 3 hops -

[Xahid]

Cant honestly say why you speeds are so low, I have an Asus RT-N16 gigabit router running the Tomato firmware, with 4x Netgear gigabit switches connected to each port on the router which reside in various rooms of the house.

Nothing really fancy, however i have always been happy with the file transfer speeds on my home network.

WOW, & I am connected throw Cisco SG 100 Giga Switch.

[AndyD]

I remember using jumbo frames back in the XP days but I sort of remember having issues after enabling it. I guess it's worth a shot regardless

EDIT - also the drives on my server are mostly green drives so all of them are 5400 rmp. The primary drive is a wd black drive, though. Not sure if the bottlenecks are due to the 5400rpm drives

[+BudMan MVC]

Jumbo frames are NOT going to be a magic pill. And unless everything in your house is gig and supports jumbo your going to cause yourself more pain.

80MB is not all that.. Yes it is quite possible with gig gear.

And sorry 3 switches does not = hops ;) Are going through 3 different "routers" then you could consider it hops.. But if they are all local and the latency is couple of ms RTT doesn't matter if it was 10 hops.

Green drives are not going to be the speed demons - they are meant for storage, low power usage not moving your file across your network at 100MB plus.

[AndyD]

So you think my drives are the culprits then? I don't really need gigabit speeds - just a little annoyed that I spent money making sure everything is gigabit compatible to still hit some bottlenecks. I'm not going to upgrade my hard drives to faster drives to overcome the issue since I am using those drives for storage / media serving purposes as you refer to

But I would at least expect some consistency. Just seems weird that sometimes I can hit 80MB/s but then can't get past 25MB/s with the same transfer from main PC to server

I enabled 4K jumbo frames before leaving my apartment. I'll see if it makes any difference later

[+BudMan MVC]

So your switch supports jumbo? And all your devices support jumbo?

Jumbo can lower cpu usage, but since I would have to think that you have devices that don't support it - you could have other issues with communication. Do you talk to wireless devices? Do you have any devices that are only 100mbit?

So when do you hit 80? From different device to your server, or from your server to your main pc?

Lets get some details

When you copy file from your server to your main pc what are the speeds? I would really suggest you test this with iperf or netio. Then do a file copy with robocopy so you can get a printout of the speed.

Now when you copy file from your main pc TO your server what is the speeds - do the same iperf/netio test in that direction as well, and again use robocopy to get printout of details of copy with speed.

Now repeat this test to some other box on your network to and from your server - is same results?

Is this other box same OS as your main PC? Same nic? Same Driver for nic?

[trek]

Obviously only enable JF if your topology supports it. My core switch is a Cat 2960S and the access are Cisco SMB SG300 devices all supporting JF. The only place they would get fragmented is out the gateway to the net.

[AndyD]

I won't be able to give you all the information necessary till I'm back at my place but for now...

These are the two DLink switches I have...

http://www.newegg.co...N82E16833127422

http://www.newegg.co...N82E16833127083

Looks like both support jumbo frames according to the specs

Asus RT-N66U is the router in use

The NICs are different but both are gigabit. One of them is Intel based on an Asus Sandy Bridge board. The other is Marvell on a Asus LGA 775 board

Transfers are from my main pc (that has the Asus board) to the server (LGA). I use either Teracopy or FlashFXP to send files ranging from 1mb to 30 GB files (bluray rips). FlashFXP seems to be slower for some reason. I was going to try Filezilla to see if it's more consistent. Either way, both Teracopy and FlashFXP vary in performance

Transfers to my main PC seem to be faster. Usually above 50MB/s.

All PCs on my network are set up with Windows 8 including server. Server used to be WHS 2011 but moved to Windows 8 to make it an HTPC as well. Storage is set up using Drive Bender which is a third party app that mimics / improves on Microsoft's Drive Extender. 4 2TB drives are pooled into one virtual drive.

It could also be performance issues with Drive Bender? I'll check into that with support after seeing how transfers do between my third PC and HTPC

On the network...

Main Desktop connected to one of the switches

Server / HTPC combo connected to router

Printer connected to one of the switches

mini HTPC for main bedroom connected through Wifi

Surface Pro on Wifi

Phone on Wifi

Xbox 360 currently on wifi

PS3 connected to one of the switches

Sony TV on Wifi

Yamaha receiver connected to router

Both switches connected to router

Currently setting up home theater and devices so most of the devices will be connected to a switch or router directly. Prefer only to use Wifi if no other option is possible

[remixedcat]

Set your QoS to make more B/W to the two target machines and lower the priority on the other machines.

[AndyD]

The other devices don't really use that much bandwith to be honest. Mostly my main pc and server. The rest are devices I use on occasion. Should I still set up QoS?

[AndyD]

Almost a year later and this is finally resolved.  My speeds ended up locked at anywhere between 4-8 MB/s and I couldn't figure out why.  Tried a different cable.  Tried everything before buying new hardware.  Then I got ###### off back in November and replaced all the green drives I had with WD reds, added a PCIE Intel network card, switched to Server 2012 R2 ( from Windows 8) and switched to DrivePool (from DriveBender).  I don't know what did it but I'm back ~80-100 MB/s.  May be the drives but I also had issues with speeds to a separate black drive I was using for game installs.  At the end of day, it really isn't that big of a deal I was locked at slower speeds but 4-8 MB/s I found pretty annoying.

[riahc3]

Hello,

Almost a year later and this is finally resolved.  My speeds ended up locked at anywhere between 4-8 MB/s and I couldn't figure out why.  Tried a different cable.  Tried everything before buying new hardware.  Then I got ****ed off back in November and replaced all the green drives I had with WD reds, added a PCIE Intel network card, switched to Server 2012 R2 ( from Windows 8) and switched to DrivePool (from DriveBender).  I don't know what did it but I'm back ~80-100 MB/s.  May be the drives but I also had issues with speeds to a separate black drive I was using for game installs.  At the end of day, it really isn't that big of a deal I was locked at slower speeds but 4-8 MB/s I found pretty annoying.

Did you do a direct network cable between two PCs? No router, no switch, just 1 cable between two PCs....

And one year later?

[AndyD]

I never connected the two.  And yeah, 1 year later.  I've made some changes over time but speeds just seemed to get worse instead of improve.  Not sure what from the list of stuff I did in November till now that helped but I'm back where I expect things to be