19 replies to this topic

[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]

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.

Xahid, on 12 February 2013 - 12:48, said:

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]

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

[SHoTTa35]

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]

InsaneNutter, on 12 February 2013 - 13:23, said:

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]

Xahid, on 13 February 2013 - 06:10, said:

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]

InsaneNutter, on 13 February 2013 - 08:14, said:

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]

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