Network Bandwidth

  • Thread starter Thread starter Khyle Westmoreland
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Khyle Westmoreland

Hi there.

I've been having a problem with my network where if I attempt to send or receive a
file over the LAN it won't run at full speed. According to the Task Manager under
Networking, it never seems to go above 8% utilisation regardless of what it is I'm
transferring.

I have tried a different cable (crossover - I'm on a peer-to-peer network) and even
different NICs in each PC but it doesn't seem to make any difference. Both machines
are running at 100Mbps.

As far as I know there should be nothing eating up all the bandwidth and the lights
on the NICs remain still if I'm not transferring anything.

Thanks in advance,
 
In
Khyle Westmoreland said:
Hi there.

I've been having a problem with my network where if I attempt to send
or receive a file over the LAN it won't run at full speed. According
to the Task Manager under Networking, it never seems to go above 8%
utilisation regardless of what it is I'm transferring.

I have tried a different cable (crossover - I'm on a peer-to-peer
network) and even different NICs in each PC but it doesn't seem to
make any difference. Both machines are running at 100Mbps.

As far as I know there should be nothing eating up all the bandwidth
and the lights on the NICs remain still if I'm not transferring
anything.

Thanks in advance,
Click to expand...

I meant to say is there any way to speed up the transfers? Any way to get near enough
100% bandwidth ulilisation.

WXP-Pro on one machine, WME on the other.
Thanks :)
 
I've been having a problem with my network where if I attempt to send or receive a
file over the LAN it won't run at full speed. According to the Task Manager under
Networking, it never seems to go above 8% utilisation regardless of what it is I'm
transferring.

I have tried a different cable (crossover - I'm on a peer-to-peer network) and even
different NICs in each PC but it doesn't seem to make any difference. Both machines
are running at 100Mbps.

As far as I know there should be nothing eating up all the bandwidth and the lights
on the NICs remain still if I'm not transferring anything.
Click to expand...

Khyle,

when you reboot both computers, then copy a large file, how long
does it take per Megabyte? That's the ultimate throughput
measurement.

The rebooting is necessary to avoid any distortions due to
caching.

Depending on whether your network or your hard disk is the
bottleneck, you should get rates of about 11 MB per second for
full throughput. Slower, older disks could throttle this down to
half that.

Hans-Georg
 
In
Hans-Georg Michna said:
Khyle,

when you reboot both computers, then copy a large file, how long
does it take per Megabyte? That's the ultimate throughput
measurement.
Click to expand...

Hi Hans-Georg

I tried rebooting both machines and then copying a file to the remote PC (ME
machine).
I copied a 50MB exe file backwards and forwards and both times got a result of
roughly 1min 50secs.

Looking at the maths (50 / 110) that's something like 0.4545 MBps (megabytes)
(*1024^2 * 8 / 1024^2) = 3.6Mbps (megabits)

That's nothing near a 100Mbps network speed and although it could be the hard drive
bottlenecking either end I doubt it as they were both recently replaced with new
models.
I did have this problem before, so I doubt it is because of that.

Thanks once again,
 
I tried rebooting both machines and then copying a file to the remote PC (ME
machine).
I copied a 50MB exe file backwards and forwards and both times got a result of
roughly 1min 50secs.

Looking at the maths (50 / 110) that's something like 0.4545 MBps (megabytes)
(*1024^2 * 8 / 1024^2) = 3.6Mbps (megabits)

That's nothing near a 100Mbps network speed and although it could be the hard drive
bottlenecking either end I doubt it as they were both recently replaced with new
models.
Click to expand...

Khyle,

you are very right that that's too slow.

My next guess, assuming that no component is broken (adapters,
cables, switch), would be that something is wrong with the half
and full duplex settings or detection. You could try to force a
full-duplex setting in all Ethernet adapters, assuming that they
connect to a switch. If it's a hub, throw it away and get a
switch (or force half-duplex on all adapters). You might try to
swap the switch anyway, for a test.

Hans-Georg
 
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