Date: 17 Jun 1996 17:56:53 -0400 From: bill@twwells.com (T. William Wells) To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: that slow transfer problem Message-ID: <4q4kb5$675@twwells.com>
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Just to let people know: it's been solved. Replacing the old isa card with a shiny new pci card did the trick. It's funny: the first time I was bitten by this particular problem was like over a decade ago. You think I'd have spotted it right away! The problem isn't that the card was so slow that it couldn't transfer at the speeds I expected. Rather, the problem was that the card was mismatched with the network. If all my other cards had been the relatively slow card that I had in my machine, all would have been well. Transfers would have been slow, but not abysmally so. However, the news machine has a nice fast interface. And, it can drive that interface so quickly that it overwhelmed the old, slow interface on ux1. With most operations, that wasn't a problem; there was a relatively slow packet exchange and no overflow problem. But, try to transfer a big batch of data and the interface dropped packets like mad. Between the dropped packets *and* the load from retransmissions, that machine was reduced to moving data through the ethernet like it was a mere serial line. The moral is: keep your ethernet cards in sync. If you stick a fast card in one machine, make sure that all the others are capable of keeping up. Otherwise, you'll find your net looking more like a serial cable than an ethernet cable. :-)
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