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Date:      Sun, 16 Mar 2003 15:37:50 -0500
From:      Bill Moran <wmoran@potentialtech.com>
To:        Olivier Dony <odony@student.info.ucl.ac.be>
Cc:        Simon Barner <barner@in.tum.de>, freebsd-questions@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: Too many collisions on network?
Message-ID:  <3E74E09E.8050203@potentialtech.com>
In-Reply-To: <025601c2ebf5$5abc25f0$1502a8c0@blacktrap.net>
References:  <005d01c2ebcb$82b343b0$1502a8c0@blacktrap.net> <20030316152335.GA1434@zi025.glhnet.mhn.de> <002201c2ebd3$92d0a7d0$1502a8c0@blacktrap.net> <3E74B8BC.4030009@potentialtech.com> <025601c2ebf5$5abc25f0$1502a8c0@blacktrap.net>

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Olivier Dony wrote:
> On Sunday, 16 March, 2003 18:47, Bill Moran wrote:
>>Going to full-duplex should reduce collisions to 0, and give you the max
>>performance available.  I just did some experimenting with turning duplex
>>from half to full and back on my computer here, and if there's any interruption,
>>it was less than I could easily measure.  Don't know if that'll be the same
>>with all switches or not.
> 
> Well after doing some poking around on other servers first, I did change the 
> mode and happily that didn't interrupt the connection. Also the collisions 
> did drop to 0 on all 3 servers where I tried it, with a small difference :
> o On the other 2 servers I changed from autoselect 10BaseT/UTP h-d 
>   (resp. 100BaseTX/UTP) to 10BaseT/UTP full-duplex (resp. 100BaseTX/UTP f-d),
>   and collisions dropped to 0, nothing else seems to have changed, still no
>   i/o errors, and no change in the bytes throughput.
> o On the server I was talking about earlier, here is an excerpt of netstat 
>   while switching from half to full-duplex and back :
> 
>             input        (Total)           output
>    packets  errs      bytes    packets  errs      bytes colls
>        900     0     141953       1261     0    1351094   633
>        938     0     163593       1048     0    1157276   543
>        782     0     126538        938     0    1090243   414
>        771     0     124376        987     0    1217638   493
>        894     0     161036       1059     0    1111060   573
>        913     0     123942       1092     0    1028476   562
>  -> going full-duplex... here I guess
>        601    11      72155        695     0     569992   132
>        461     8      61467        566     0     560226     0
>        462    12      61552        546     0     649187     0
>        477     6      72589        555     0     649629     0
>        517    13      79602        624     0     668592     0
>  -> back to half-duplex with autoselect .. looks like here
>          0     0      42814          0     0     500765     0
>        815     0     150286       1128     0    1841082   749
>       1062     0     176522       1478     0    2051510   554
> 
> The input errors and other numbers were consistent during the few minutes of
> testing in all 3 cases, but I cut it to a few lines for the sake of the 
> mailing-list. Is this increase in input errors and drop in bytes throughput a
> problem? I guess the input errors are not good, when we can see that there are
> no real erroneous packets coming in before. As for the change in throughput 
> while the server load stayed constant, it doesn't look good either, and I didn't 
> notice the same behaviour on the 2 others. Those don't have the same load though.
> 
> Any ideas? And thanks again, I've learned a lot so far with your kind help :-)

Off the top of my head I would worry about wiring faults, or a switch with a bad
port, or possibly a buggy NIC.  Collisions are normal on half-duplex networks, and
errors are normal on all networks, but not at the levels you're reporting.  I
can't think of where else to look but a hardware issue at this point, but I could
be wrong.

-- 
Bill Moran
Potential Technologies
http://www.potentialtech.com


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