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Path: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au!newshost.carno.net.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!munnari.OZ.AU!news.ecn.uoknor.edu!news.wildstar.net!imci5!imci4!newsfeed.internetmci.com!feed1.news.erols.com!howland.erols.net!nntp.crl.com!Symiserver2.symantec.com!news From: tedm@agora.rdrop.com Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc Subject: Re: Question: UTP Network Card - ISA v's PCI Date: 6 Oct 1996 16:20:35 GMT Organization: Symantec Corp. Lines: 29 Message-ID: <538m8j$b9d@Symiserver2.symantec.com> References: <nigel.206.00136DC5@4kz.com.au> <531a9l$p72@verdi.nethelp.no> Reply-To: tedm@agora.rdrop.com NNTP-Posting-Host: shiva1.central.com X-Newsreader: IBM NewsReader/2 v1.2.5 In <531a9l$p72@verdi.nethelp.no>, sthaug@nethelp.no (Steinar Haug) writes: >[Nigel Gorry] > >| I have a P120 running FreeBSD as a Web server and I was wondering if a PCI >| network card would increase the speed with which clients recieve pages. >| I currently have a 16-bit ISA NE2000 Compatible. > >A PCI based card of the busmastering type will make the CPU do less work, >since it doesn't have to move the data using PIO. Thus you'll have more > Actually, what you want to do is put a network sniffer on your network, there are a number of commercial ones and some freeware ones as well. If your running your network at a high utilization (above 50%) then swapping your network card isin't going to help anything as the ISA card will have been driving the net as hard as it can go already. For example, at the company I work at we do educational classes and such, and we have a program which we can use with a classroom full of PC's to pull a central image file from a server down to all machines simultaneously to set up their disks however we want. We use 100 base ISA cards in all the clients and the server, since the server is usually a hardware duplicate of the clients. At our last event we were loaned a stack of 100base PCI cards, and we put them in all the clients and server. We found no difference in the time it took to image 15 PC's simultaneously with the PCI cards verses the ISA cards. These were all Pentium 166's Fastest time we clocked was 15 minutes for a 1.2 gig image file going from a single server to a single client. For all 15 machines it took 4 hours.