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Path: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au!newshost.carno.net.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!munnari.OZ.AU!news.mel.connect.com.au!news.syd.connect.com.au!news.bri.connect.com.au!corolla.OntheNet.com.au!not-for-mail From: Tony Griffiths <tonyg@OntheNet.com.au> Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc Subject: Re: help improve news server performance Date: Thu, 03 Jul 1997 11:10:23 +1000 Organization: On the Net (ISP on the Gold Coast, Australia) Lines: 31 Message-ID: <33BAFBFF.5BE8@OntheNet.com.au> References: <5padjp$1ot$1@news.futuresouth.com> <33B9FCA9.59@OntheNet.com.au> <50rdp5.43a.ln@shift.utell.net> Reply-To: tonyg@OntheNet.com.au NNTP-Posting-Host: swanee.nt.com.au Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Mailer: Mozilla 3.0 (WinNT; I) To: brian@awfulhak.org, brian@utell.co.uk Xref: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc:43839 Brian Somers wrote: > > [.....] > > 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. The NE2000 (clone) cards I had dropped every second packet in this situation, resulting is abissmal data throughput for bulk xfer (ftp). A DEC DE20x card with 64KB of onboard RAM worked quite well with average xfer rate > 750KB/s even though it was ISA bus! So it really depends on the buffering on the card. Get buffer overruns and protocols usually die an agonising death... > -- > Brian <brian@awfulhak.org> <brian@freebsd.org> > <http://www.awfulhak.org> > Don't _EVER_ lose your sense of humour !