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From: sthaug@nethelp.no (Steinar Haug)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc
Subject: Re: help improve news server performance
Date: 12 Jul 1997 19:36:09 GMT
Organization: Nethelp Consulting, Trondheim, Norway
Lines: 63
Message-ID: <5q8mb9$kdh@verdi.nethelp.no>
References: <5padjp$1ot$1@news.futuresouth.com> <33B9FCA9.59@OntheNet.com.au>
<50rdp5.43a.ln@shift.utell.net> <33BAFBFF.5BE8@OntheNet.com.au>
NNTP-Posting-Host: dole.uninett.no
In-reply-to: Tony Griffiths's message of Thu, 03 Jul 1997 11:10:23 +1000
Cache-Post-Path: dole.uninett.no!unknown@verdi.nethelp.no
Xref: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc:44325
[Tony Griffiths]
| > I have an SMC ISA card (dunno which brand) in a P100 here that gives
| > the same performance as my original NE2000 clone on a 486DX33 at home
| > years ago - 850k per seconds - that's almost 7Mbps !
| >
| > There's nothing bad about ISA NICs.
|
| It's not the ISA bus itself that is the problem (although ISA bus' are
| not particularly friendly on high speed machines!) but the small amount
| of receive buffering generally put on earlier model (or designed) ISA
| bus Ethernet cards. Working on the assumption that machines could only
| generate a fraction of the 10 Mbps Ethernet speed (averaged of course),
| designers economised on the amount of on-board RAM. Now days, an SMC
| PCI card with the 21x4x chip onboard has absolutely no problem spitting
| 1.1MB/s down a 10Mbps Ethernet, often with back-to-back packets.
. and a reasonable NE2000 clone has no problem receiving them - see the
article included below. I have had very good experience with the Kingston
NE2000 clones.
Given that FreeBSD by default has the RFC 1323 and RFC 1644 TCP options
turned on, the payload of each 1500 byte Ethernet packet is 1440 bytes,
and 1100 kBytes/s corresponds to (1100*8192*1538/1440)/100000 = 96.24%
of the 10 Mbps Ethernet bandwidth - not counting the ACKs in the reverse
direction. If you include the ACKs (one ACK for every two full sized
packets), you get 99.31% :-)
Not all NE2000 clones are bad. On the other hand, 10/100 PCI cards are so
inexpensive these days that I don't think I'll ever buy an ISA Ethernet
card again.
Steinar Haug, Nethelp consulting, sthaug@nethelp.no
----------------------------------------------------------------------
From: sthaug@nethelp.no (Steinar Haug)
Subject: Re: low-cost ethernet recomendations?
Date: 10 Jan 1997 20:49:25 GMT
Message-ID: <5b6a0l$6fc@verdi.nethelp.no>
[Jeff Aitken]
| I'll second J'oerg's recommendation for an SMC 8013. I've got three of
| these in use with both FreeBSD and Windows NT machines, and they're
| great. Seems to me I ran some very informal benchmarks awhile back and
| was able to converse between two machines on a very lightly loaded
| ethernet at a respectable fraction of line speed, so their performance
| isn't all that bad.
Yes, the "stupid ISA cards" aren't all that bad. Just for kicks I did
some ttcp tests between a P-133 (2.2-961014-SNAP, DEC 21040 based card)
and a PPro-200 (2.2-BETA, NE2000 clone on ISA bus). I was able to get an
extremely respectable fraction of the line speed, as reported by ttcp:
P-133 -> PPro-200 1060 kByte/s
PPro-200 -> P-133 1100 kByte/s
Mind you, this was an otherwise quiet Ethernet.
Of course the NE2000 clones use more of the CPU than the 21040s - but on
a PPro-200, it disappears in the background noise with only one 10 Mbit/s
Ethernet :-)
Steinar Haug, Nethelp consulting, sthaug@nethelp.no