[RndTbl] Followup on slow file transfer on my LAN

Gilles Detillieux grdetil at scrc.umanitoba.ca
Mon Jan 30 09:16:34 CST 2006


John Lange wrote:
> On Sun, 2006-01-29 at 20:30 -0600, Mike Pfaiffer wrote:
> 
>> I've also followed up with a suggestion to look at mii-tools. It generates an 
>>error as if the card were too old to be used this way.
> 
> 
> What card is it exactly? Most likely the linux drivers for that card are
> buggy. There are quite a number of older odd-ball cards that were never
> properly implemented in linux and haven't been updated in years. (I had
> a lot of these problems with TI chips for example).
> 
> Run out and pick up a new NIC card. They are dirt cheap these days (less
> than $20) and I'll bet that will solve your problem.

Just avoid any cards based on the VIA Rhine chipset.  I too had 
experienced some odd slowness on a network connection on one Linux box, 
though it was mostly sending from the Linux box that was unusually slow 
(and got slower when I moved from a 10 Mb/s hub to a 10/100 switch!).  I 
did some reading up on the driver for this chipset and found that the 
developer had essentially given up on it because it was so bad.  It has 
a very high error rate.  Under Windows, its performance seems decent 
enough, but probably because the Windows driver shrugs off errors and 
retries more quickly than the Linux driver developer wanted to do.  I 
usually get good performance out of Realtek RTL-8139 chipsets (in a 
number of different NICs), as well as 3Com 3C905 cards and Intel chipsets.

-- 
Gilles R. Detillieux              E-mail: <grdetil at scrc.umanitoba.ca>
Spinal Cord Research Centre       WWW:    http://www.scrc.umanitoba.ca/
Dept. Physiology, U. of Manitoba  Winnipeg, MB  R3E 3J7  (Canada)


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